Fishing for Men

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. Mike Ebendroth here, Michael E. Ebendroth. What did we talk about at the beginning of the show? What did we talk about? You know, we were just talking about food.

Sometimes Pete's Coffee. I did have Pete's Coffee today. Mrs. Smith on the West Coast said every time she thinks about Pete's Coffee or Peeps, she thinks of No Compromise Radio. Well, thank you very much.

I appreciate that. I wish I got a cut. In the past, I have gone to Pete's Coffee before in Santa Cruz and told them I talk about coffee on the radio all the time and basically try to figure out how to get a free drink.

It has not worked. And maybe I've said this before. I'm not sure, but I guess I can tell the story now. My dear friend, Ray Johnson, who went to be with the Lord, it's now been 26 months or something like that, two years, a couple of months.

And Ray was the one who really helped get No Compromise Radio off the ground. And he has quite a few businesses or had them steal business and other things. And he said, I don't want you begging for money.

I'll just support the ministry and I'll pay for you to be on the radio. I'll pay for the equipment. And just don't beg for money. Don't ask for money. Just if you need something, let me know behind the scenes.

Don't tell anybody. And I can tell now because he's not going to lose rewards. He's got them. And Ray was the one who started saying, you know what? I, Ray, will put No Compromise Radio advertisement slots on Wretched Radio, pay Wretched to run NoCo ads.

And then eventually Todd Friel asked me to host a few shows. I think I ended up hosting about 20 shows and that's how we kind of got onto Wretched Radio. And quite a few people who listen now to me, they say, I first heard you, Mike, on Wretched Radio.

Todd Friel, by the way, was very kind. When he heard I had leukemia, he asked if he could come preach, serve in any way on his own dime. Todd, thank you very much for that. And also, Todd, thank you for giving away about 700 gospel assurance books.

When people are struggling with assurance, Todd would graciously, with the ministry there, give them a book on gospel assurance. Well, back to Ray and Pete's Coffee. See where this is going? No, you don't see, but now you will see.

Ray said to me one year, it was probably 10 years ago, I'd like to buy you for Christmas two pounds of Pete's Coffee per month for one year, a one-year subscription. So I said, that'd be great. And he didn't cancel after a year.

And I said to him, like the 13th month, I got more coffee. And I said, well, I keep getting coffee, Ray. You might want to cancel that. And he goes, do you use it? Do you drink it? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's two pounds.

It's gone in a couple of weeks. So I put a lot of ground, I put a lot of coffee in there, grind it up and put it in. And he said, well, then just let it ride. So then a few years later, you sure you still want to do it?

Do you drink it? Yes. He even said, would you like more than two a month? And I, my answer was in my mind, yes, but I didn't dare say it. I said, I'm good. Thank you. You're more than generous and gracious.

So when Ray died, among other things, and I officiated his, I went and visited him before he died and asked him if he was afraid to die. He shook his head no. And I said, good, because the Lord Jesus loves you and paid for all your sins and has been raised from the dead and you're going to heaven.

All his family was in the room there and it was a special time. I went to his funeral and officiated that. So many people, so many business people, businessmen and women, because Ray wanted to keep his word and it was impactful in the community.

And I thought there's going to be more people at Ray Johnson's funeral than there will be at mine. So praise the Lord for that. Anyway, I have other comments about my funeral, but not right now. So I talked to Ray's wife and I said, after he died, maybe a month later, you know, I still keep getting coffee so you can cancel it.

And so all that to say, while I never got a free Pete's coffee from Pete's coffee itself, I got 10 years of free coffee. And I know his Amex number, but I've never used it. Wonderful story. So if you've been blessed by No Compromise Radio Ministry, it's by saints like Ray behind the scenes.

And isn't that the way it is? Even at local churches? And I can't do what I do unless people are in the nursery, setting up chairs, taking down chairs, taking care of, you know, parking lot ministry, ladies serving behind the scenes, you know, and the ladies really are the backbone of the church in so many different areas in ways.

And some are out in front, right? And some are behind the scenes. And just like when it comes to military fighting, you know, the large majority of those enlisted aren't fighting, but they're just helping the frontline people.

And so similarly, many similarities here at No Compromise Radio Ministry. But since it's that time of year, I just want you to know we're really low on funds. Ray would kill me if I said that. He's kind of sitting on my shoulder going, why would you ever ask for money?

Do people know that, you know, there are costs to keeping a website up or new, you know, sound boards or microphones? Of course they know that. So anyway, I think we have 10, 12, 15 supporters on Patreon, more than I deserve.

If you are a Patreon supporter, thank you very, very much. I don't use the money for coffee. We're talking about Jesus here. Remember that old show here locally? Let's talk about Jesus. And Jesus commissioning Peter, James, and John into gospel ministry with the fish and the boats and filling it up and Peter down on his knees in the middle of the fish saying depart from me.

I'm a sinful man. Oh, Lord. And Peter says, you know, get away from me. I recognize you're holy. You're the God man. And Jesus says, don't be afraid, right? I'm going to make you a fisher of man. I'm going to make you catch souls of men, quite different.

And fish are caught alive and killed later. Now we have these dead men walking spiritually and now you're going to be the vehicle that is going to bring them the gospel and then they will be alive spiritually.

And I was just thinking about fishers of men. I don't fish that much. I've fished a lot in my life. And since we spent summers up on the river, there was a lake, then the dam, then the river, Lewis and Clark Lake, Gavin's Point Dam, and then the Missouri River that ran down from that.

We would fish once in a while. But you know, the fishing we did, it was a little more Nebraska exotic. That is to say we would have a fishing reel attached to a bow and then you use a bow and arrow, right?

You'd attach the arrow to the end of the fishing line and then you could shoot fish. So that made it more interesting, more fun than just kind of blindly throwing a hook over. We did some drop lines along the pilings and you would just have a weight and a hook and then we'd have some rotten liver that we'd chop up.

It kind of had some little vein things in it, so it was hard to get off the hook by just the water running down the river. And then we would go park our boats right underneath the dam when the dam was closed and you could just hook up on the dam itself, clip in, and then you would snag for paddle fish.

And paddle fish don't eat food like the regular fish would, so you have to snag the side of it. And we'd have a treble hook and a very sturdy rod and we would fish that way. So we did those kind of fishing, but just like a bobber and stuff like that, not often.

Well, I keep telling my grandson Amos that I'm going to take him fishing. I don't know why, but I keep saying all the time, and he's too young to know what it is, that we're going to go fishing. And I guess grandpas like to fish with grandsons because it just gets you out in the nature, in the realm of nature, and you have to talk and then you have to horse around.

And you got a little bobber and maybe when the grandson's not looking, you catch a fish and you put it on his hook. Just that kind of stuff. Just something to go do when you're old and decrepit and you can't do anything else.

What do you do, say? And they're little too, so they can't do a lot. You can't say, well, let's go play tennis for two hours. They can't even really pick up a racket five, six years old, right? Although there are probably some exceptions.

So I was thinking about fishing, and in the past, when I thought about fishing, I didn't really think much about the Bible, but now I'm tying it into the Bible here on No Compromise Radio Ministry. I'm not sure if you know this, but fishing in the Old Testament, the metaphor for fishing is pretty much divine judgment metaphors.

It's unlike what's going on in Luke 5, and that's why it's pretty dramatic when you hear Jesus say that to Peter in chapter 5, verses 10 and 11. Let me read you some verses from the Old Testament that talk about divine judgment when you think of fishing.

Habakkuk 1, why hast thou made men like the fish of the sea, like creeping things without a ruler over them, that Chaldeans bring all of them up with a hook, drag them away with their net, and gather them together in their fishing net?

Therefore they rejoice and are glad. Therefore they offer a sacrifice to their net and burn incense to their fishing net, because through these things their catch is large and their food is plentiful.

Will they therefore empty their net and continually slay nations without sparing? Jeremiah 16, behold, I'm going to send for many fishermen, declares the Lord, and they will fish for them. And afterwards I will send for many hunters and they will hunt them from every mountain and every hill and from the clefts of the rock.

Ezekiel 29, I shall put hooks in your jaws and I shall make the fish of your rivers cling to your scales, and I shall bring you up out of the midst of your rivers, and all of the fish of your rivers will cling to your scales.

And I shall abandon you to the wilderness, you and all the fish of your rivers. You will fall in the open field. You will not be brought together or gathered. I have given you for food to the beasts of the earth and to the birds of the skies.

So, you're regularly going to see, especially in the prophetic writings, divine judgment, judgment of some kind when we use the metaphor of fishing. Here, the Lord Jesus, here meaning in Luke 5 and Matthew 4, fishers of men, this is rescuing people from divine judgment.

This is taking them out of the sea. I'm going to make you fishers of men. You've got the commission to go out and make disciples, proclaim the good news about the risen Savior, the Lord Jesus, out of a desire to glorify God and to love neighbor as yourself.

There's a Boston comedian that I used to really like, and I haven't really listened to him much lately, but he did those kind of sardonic one-liners, deadpan, bald on the top, big fluffy hair on the side, Stephen Wright.

There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an idiot. A very fine line. See, I told you. And so, I'm going to use what other people have used in the past and put my own little spin on it of fishing analogies and what not to do and then what to do when it comes to evangelism.

What if you said, I don't have a fishing license, therefore I can't fish for men. All authority has been given to me in heaven and earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I command you.

And lo, I'm with you always, even to the end of the age. Okay? So far, so good. Do you need a license? Do you need permission? Do you need to have an open door? Do you need to have a burning in the bosom?

Right? You can't say I wasn't led to evangelize that guy. You just didn't do it. I wasn't led to do that. And the way we teach this is you tell your children, they're 10 years old, please pick up your room.

10-minute pickup, please. You come back and you say, not one toy has been picked up. What have you been doing? I wasn't led to do what you said, Dad. You don't need to be led when you've already been commanded, especially from a dad who loves you and provides for you.

See where I'm going with that? Am I right? Another problem when it comes to fishing is what if you said, you know what? I'm using the wrong bait. I'm using the wrong bait. What's the wrong bait when you evangelize?

Here's the wrong bait. Come to Jesus and your marriage will be fixed. Come to Jesus and you'll be prosperous in your job. Come to Jesus and you'll be healthy. Come to Jesus and your neighbors will like you.

Come to Jesus and you'll get a lot of money. Come to Jesus and, okay, you meet Christian girls. I have that in my notes. Oh, why? You have to have the right bait, right? The bait. And again, I just, this is, you know, in parenthesis, in posture, you start to say something, you think, is that the right word?

I remember my dad telling me the story. He went out fishing one time and they rented a boat and they had too many beers. And so they had some dynamite on their waterproof wicks and they tied them around the oars and then lit them and then pushed the oar all the way under so that you're holding the handle of the oar and the paddle part of the oar has the stick of dynamite, the mini stick of dynamite tied at the bottom.

And then it makes this huge underwater explosion, of course, wrecks the paddle. And then the fish that are shocked, they float to the top. That's a way you can get the fish. Stunned fish. How do you, I mean, if you're a hyper-Calvinist, don't believe in evangelism, I guess you don't need any bait.

Bait shops in Nebraska by the river, you could get earthworms. We just try to dig for our own. You could get liver, like I said before. You could get lures. You could get crawdads, like salamanders, you could get whatever you want.

But you want to use the right kind of bait and that is you want to honor God by talking about the sign. You don't need to cut and paste and pick and choose what you're going to talk about. You just need to proclaim the truth.

Christ should suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and repents for forgiveness of sin should be proclaimed in his name to all nations beginning in Jerusalem. And then you're set. Let's see, what else?

Special fishing holes to go to. I think I want to talk about only special places to fish. Casting. Let's talk about casting for a second. When you go out in a boat, you could just drop your line right there because you're already out in the deep.

So why do you want to try to cast so far away from the boat? If you're on the shore, I get it. You got to cast far out. So here are my notes. I don't really, I think this is probably 25, 30 year old notes here.

Casting too far out, you know, you're afraid to witness to your next door neighbor, but you want to go on a short-term mission trip to Russia. That's what I have in my notes. All right. Last thing I'll talk about.

I think it's last. We're 18 minutes in. Really? 18 minutes? Time's going by pretty fast, don't you think? I know. What if you combine that with this? Bad DJ. All right. Fish stories. Right? You always talk about the one that got away.

You always talk about, you know, probably exaggerate how big the fish was that you caught, how many. What if you go out and evangelize and no fish get caught? Nobody repents. Nobody prays. Nobody says they believe in Jesus.

They want to dedicate their life to Him. What do you do? Well, it doesn't matter in the sense of success or failure because you're just being, you know, you're entrusted with the gospel and you're not hiding it under a bushel, and God is honored when you talk about a son.

That's why we don't have to put tick marks in our Bible of people that we led to the Lord. If somebody is responsive to the gospel that you preach and they say they believed and everything else, and you want to write in your Bible, pray for so-and-so who made a profession of faith on such and such a day.

There's nothing wrong with that because that's a reminder to pray. Galatians 6, 14,. But may it never be that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.

So we don't devote, we don't boast in our evangelistic methods and how many people we won to the Lord and everything else. That's kind of a fish story. That's a bad fish story. Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom and let not the mighty man boast of his might.

Let not a rich man boast of his riches. But let him who boasts, boast of this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, justice, and righteousness on the earth.

For I delight in these things, declares the Lord. I think that's a better way to go, don't you? And we just say, well, I'm just thankful to be able to be used. And I'm just a servant. I've done my duty.

And that's what servants are expected to do. Right? And so when you tell fish stories, the ones that got away, make sure you're talking about these things in a very God-centered way. If you didn't quote unquote, catch anything, you're still talking about the Lord to people.

And remember, there are other analogies besides fishing analogies and their farming analogies and some plants and some water and some, you know, there's, it's just slow going and you can't always see things.

I'm going to sneeze here in just a second. And so when I do, I'm going to have to hit this button because it's, I can feel that it's coming and it's not. Wow. I love it that Jesus doesn't say, I'm going to, you better learn how to be fishers of men.

Excuse me. But it, and I know you couldn't hear that, but I sure could. One after another, after another. Oh, Thomas Boston writes a good book. He's a Merrill man. He's one of the representers and he writes a good book on the art of fishing, maybe the art of fishing for men or something like that.

Really good book. Oh, the soliloquy on the art of man fishing. What does that mean? Don't talk about how many angels fit on the pin of a needle. I don't know the head of a needle. There's no pin of a needle.

I could have got a better illustration, but I just opened it up kind of randomly and looked. Fishers catch fish with a net. So preachers have a net to catch souls with. This is the everlasting gospel, the word of peace and reconciliation whereby sinners are caught.

It is compared to a net wherein fishers catch fish. Okay. So that's a little bit better. We're redeeming Thomas Boston. Ministers are fishers by office. They are catchers of the souls of men sent to open the eyes of the blind and to turn them from the darkness to light and from the power of Satan unto God, Acts 26, 18, excuse me.

The design and work of fishers is to catch fish. This is the work that preachers of the gospel have taken in hand, even to endeavor to bring souls to men. Their design and their work should be the same.

Tell me, oh my soul, what is thy design in preaching? For what end dost thou lay the net in the water? It is to show thy gifts and to gain the applause of men. Oh no, it is not that. Lord, thou knowest my gifts are very small and I had not some other thing than them to lean to.

I had never gone to a pulpit. I confess that as small as they are, the devil and my corruption do sometime present them to me in a magnifying glass and so would blow me up with wind. But Lord, thou knowest it is my work to repel these notions.

An instance of this seen in my diary, January 1, 1699. That is Thomas Boston. Well, Mike Ebenruth here, No Compromise Radio Ministry. If you do preach and somebody responds, you didn't open their eyes, you didn't do anything except you were glad to be a part of it.

And by the way, that is a blessing. I never want to minimize that, that the Lord would use me to save someone. And as a pastor, I preached for a long time and people have said that they've got saved underneath the ministry of Bethlehem Bible Church pulpit.

I have relatives that have heard me preach and they've been saved. And that's, I mean, the Lord would use me? That is an awesome thing. And I don't want to somehow come across today that that's less than wonderful.

Let's see. Oh, what about this? I said I was going to stop and I remember this. P .S. I love to fish. Do real fishermen love to fish? I hope so. They probably wouldn't be real fishermen. I mean, sometimes it's work.

That's true because it could be a job, but people are passionate and enthusiastic and they go to Cabela's and they watch fishing shows. Remember when you only had three channels plus PBS? The wide world of sports would be on Saturday, I don't know, in the summer or something when there's no football or basketball.

And what do you watch? There's a fishing show. I'm sure they have them now. Some of it is I think they like to get out of the house because if you sit in your house all day long and you don't have anything to do, that's not any good.

You got to get out. My wife wants to fly fish. She always, always talking about fly fishing. I don't know much about fly fishing. The things that I've seen, they've, you know, I don't know much about fly fishing, but I it looks kind of cool.

I don't mind fishing. I don't like cleaning fish, but I would do it. If I caught a good fish, I would do it. I remember catching catfish and bullheads, catfish in the river and bullheads in some of these little lakes and ponds, these farm ponds.

And man, those are hard to clean because they're going to sting you and stick you with their stickers, like little prongs, little pointy. What are they? Somebody's going to call me and they'll say, I'm going to get a text in three weeks.

And they're going to say, by the way, they were called stickers. The Latin is such, such, but then I'm going to go, what are they talking about? Because I don't remember what these shows are all about.

I have no idea. We talk too much. I think James three talks about that as well. Maybe James one. Mikey Madroth, no compromise rate in ministry. Don't forget cancer. A 30, cancer is not your shepherd. A 31 day guide to suffering that is out.

Now on Amazon, and if you know someone with cancer, that would be a wonderful book to give to them. Simple, easy to read personal. And then the updated and revised with extra grace and kindness, sexual fidelity, a 31 day guide to purity.

Both of those are out now on Amazon, along with discovering Colossians. That's pretty new. That was a year ago. And then the 31 day guide has a third book and that is gospel assurance. We're working on a 31 day guide to parenting and a few other 31 day guides, but we'll see Lord willing what happens.

I get all fired up and then I take a break and then I get all fired up and take a break. I did go to the doctor this week, the hospital, my blood tests so far look good. Probably be on these two cancer targeting drugs for CLL, for leukemia through about November, 2025, possibly could get off of them in 2024, but you'll have to deal with my tiredness and my lethargy and my dizziness and all that other stuff through 2025, maybe, but just today's the day the Lord has made.

Let us rejoice and be glad in him. My name is Mike Avendroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry.