Divine Calling

The Template of Divine Calling

Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. Mike Avendroth here. I just set a record in the last 38 to 3900 No Compromise radio shows. Most of the time I do not re-record the show. If I make a mistake, I just make a mistake.

It's like we're just talking. We make mistakes when we talk. And sometimes I'm four minutes into the show, two minutes into the show, one minute into the show, and I think, yeah, this isn't too good. I've not spoken rightly or well, and I just cancel and start over.

Probably about five minutes was the new record. I talked for five minutes, and then I said, nah, I can't do it. Well, I was nine minutes and 50-some seconds into the last time I recorded the show, and.

It was bad, so I had to re-do it.

So if today's show is bad, you should have heard the other one. If you send a donation into our Patreon account, I'll send you those nine minutes.

It's official.

Cancer and sexual fidelity books are now out on Amazon and Amazon alone. The first book, Cancer Is Not Your Shepherd, a 31-day guide to suffering. That's out on Amazon, $17 .99. Unless you want to buy in bulk, then you can email me, mikeatnocompromiseradio .com.

In addition, I updated Sexual Fidelity with a little more law gospel, a little more grace, a little more duplex gratia, duplex gratia radio. And that's out also, Sexual Fidelity, a 31-day guide to suffering.

Last book only had 30 chapters and no real appendix, and so we have 31 chapters revised and updated. So that's an extra chapter and the extra appendix, and that is $18 .99. I want to say it's a couple hundred pages long.

I think the first book was only maybe $130. I don't even know. Who knows? So if you order on the website the old Sexual Fidelity that's got a black cover, not the new one that's got a mountain with snow covering it, signifying purity, then I'll just say you need to go to Amazon to order.

All right? So, Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry. That's the second and third book in the 31-day series, 31-day guide series. On the back of the books, you'll see the black 31 circle, 31 in circle, and that's the 31-day.

Guide series.

I have one on parenting that's planned and a couple of others that I probably shouldn't say because I don't want you to steal my idea, but I have that idea. Today, on No Compromise Radio, I want you to see a template, and if you have Microsoft Word or you have Pages or something else, you can get a template for your document.

Now, there are a lot of templates that have temperaments. They're sanguine. They're melancholy. They're What are the other ones? The four temperaments, sanguine, melancholy, irritability, and hospitality.

This is the template for how God calls people, how God commissions a person, and it's interesting because we'll look at some biblical examples today, but since we're the same as the people that are in the Old Testament and New, that is, image bearers, fallen, God's immutable.

God doesn't change. He doesn't even change at the incarnation. Make sure you don't think God somehow changes. You better have a better theology than God changes at the incarnation or at any time, for that matter.

I mean, if you just say, make sure you keep immutability, immutable, then you could never say God changes, right? Nothing like he now has a covenantal intimacy and he changes who he is once that covenant's been done, all this other stuff.

You'd never say that. He just never changes. So if ever someone said to you, does God change when this happens? Well, the answer is no, he's immutable. Did God change at the incarnation? No. Now you have, you might have some explaining to do as Ricky might ask Lucy on I Love Lucy,.

The show.

Did you know Star Trek was produced by Desi Lu Studio?

Desi Lucio?

That's true. Did you know, you know, James Tiberius Kirk, he's still alive. William Shatner is in his nineties. That's amazing. His hair looks better than ever. It's amazing that toupees just never fail.

Easy for me to say, as I've got a huge, you know, bald spot on the top of my head, God's template for commissioning people. And you'll see, oh yeah, that's what happened to me. That's what the Lord did.

This is all of our testimonies, essentially. How does God commission a person into gospel ministry, into being a godly worker, a godly mother, a godly neighbor, right? We're not talking about only radical stuff and you have to go be a pastor or a missionary or a missionary's wife or pastor's wife in some, you know, place full of cannibals.

You know, nobody's ever been there before outside of the local tribes. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about just, here's how God commissions his people. And what you'll see is, first God reveals himself, right?

Shows how great he is. Then there's a response to that greatness. And the unbelievers' greatness is fear, right? A servile fear, afraid because of their sins, of course, and you realize if God's revealed himself to show himself so holy and transcendent and sovereign.

And so full of authority that when you see yourself compared to other people, you're not too bad, but compared to this great God who's revealed himself to you today now in scripture specifically, then you respond with fear.

There's a reassurance. You do not have to be afraid. And then there's a commissioning. So, God shows himself, there's a response, then there's reassurance, and then there's the commissioning or the reaction or the responsibility because of who God is and who you are and what he has done, right?

That's it.

That's a template. That's the template for how God commissions a person. The sovereign, holy, authoritative God of the universe shows himself. You see him for who he is. You see then yourself for who you are.

You know the comforting words, don't be afraid, and here's the balm of the gospel. And you respond out of gratitude to say, I'll go anywhere. I'll do anything. I've been in New England now, just finished my 27th year.

I thought it was 28, but I'm going into my 28th year. And this isn't true because it happened in my life, but this is just how God does it. That's how it is true. That's exactly what happened to me, right?

You can just think about yourself and where you are as a Christian and how you became a Christian, and all of a sudden you think, okay, I was minding my own business. My father gets cancer, terminal cancer.

I began to ask more questions. I began to read the Bible. I began to talk to other people about who God is. I began to listen to the radio, and God showed me himself. I was very thankful for that now, but at the time, then you realize, well, that just shows how much of a sinner I am.

And God is terrifying to sinners, and it is a holy God that instills such fear. It is something to understand that God is a consuming fire. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of a living God, and we're afraid.

I was afraid. Then God reassures you because of the personal work of Jesus, and then you get this assurance that you're a child of God, and then you say, I'll do anything. Send me wherever you want. You know, in the old days, you'd say, well, if you don't want to go to the Bahamas, just say to the Lord, just send me anywhere but Bahamas, because lots of times when people say, just please don't send me anywhere, I mean, I'll go anywhere except to France, and then off to France you go, or French-speaking Quebec.

Maybe you'll make it there, or the French Guyanas, or something like that. But if you have that, you know, I'll go anywhere but, and then somehow the Lord gets you there. That's always kind of, you know, fun stories to tell people.

Fun facts about God commissioning people. But I had a desire to stay in America. It wasn't that I was against, or I would have said no, but my desire was to stay in America, so I only looked in America.

And my desire to stay in America was, I'm probably not that great at languages, and I'd like to be able to speak and preach in English, and family, and everything else. Maybe some of those were selfish.

Maybe some of them were not. Nonetheless, I got here in 1997, April, excuse me, April 2nd, and it snowed 30 inches the day.

Before.

As a matter of fact, today is April 5th, 2024, and April 4th, it snowed about six inches here. I'm looking outside, it's all snow. My wife and I were just out riding our bicycles the other day, and there is now snow.

And I said, I'll go anywhere. And I had no idea that I'd end up in New England. But of course, as I interviewed and things became clear that this is where I had an opportunity to go, I just went. I figured people in New England need Jesus to be preached to them as well.

And I look back and I think that's exactly the template for ministry. That's a template for commissioning a person to be a Christian. And by the way, this should give you great hope if you have unbelieving friends, family, spouse, children, grandparents, parents, that when God does show Himself to people, and they understand Him properly by the Holy Spirit, they see their sin, they're afraid, and then God, in His grace and in His timing, grants reassurance.

And then you become a follower of the Lord Jesus. You believe in the Lord, and what happens in the sanctification category? You follow Him. Luke chapter 5 gives this template with Jesus and Simon and some disciples with a boat and fishing and nets and a revelation of who He is.

And that's what we're going to look at today, Luke chapter 5 verses 1 through 11. Now, Luke is driving everyone to have certainty that Jesus is the Christ, remember? Luke chapter 1 verse 4. And in this section here, we've got Jesus sovereignly, authoritatively calling Peter, James, and John.

He, the sovereign authoritative one, cleanses the leper, heals the paralytic, calls Levi, the sovereign over Sabbath issues, calls the twelve. In chapter 5 and 6, you just see that. You see sovereignty, holiness, and the response to believe and then to follow.

This is the general way God works. This is the way God does things. I don't know why I'm so tired today, but twice so far in the show, I've had to mute my yawns. I sometimes would mute my cough and then say that I just coughed, but then that would undo what I just muted.

Did I tell you James Tiberius Kirk is still alive? I don't watch the new Star Trek stuff now, but I think it's the fourth season of something else on Paramount Plus. And of course, inappropriate DEI, wokeville stuff.

You know, not only do we have women in charge of every tough guy show, right? You've got 007 or you've got Borne, all these people. It's the women who are always in charge of stuff. Got that happening, but now you've got DEI charts flipped upside down.

I think they have a black woman commander now.

Captain?

Captain, commander. I don't care what color people are. I just want them to be the best. We live in a meritocracy, at least that's what we used to live in. And no quotas, you just, hey, if you're the best, you're the best.

You don't get into schools because of anything other than you're the best. But that's not what's happening. But I think Texas someplace just kicked out a university there, about 40 or 50 DEI woke stuff people.

And I think Florida is doing that as well. I think we probably run the course with Black Lives Matter and DEI and other things that I usually don't talk about, but I guess we could, right? I guess I could have James Lindsay on and we could talk about migrants over flooding the system.

So the system has to be broken. And then to fix the system, we're all going to need social credit scores and other things. But see, that's not what we talk about here. Because we talk about the Lord, Jesus, and in this case, a miraculous catch of fish.

The Crowd Presses in to Hear the Word of God

On one occasion, while the crowds, Luke 5, were pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret. He saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.

Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. And so, on this particular occasion, people want to hear the word of God, and he's standing by the lake of Gennesaret, the Sea of Cenereth, or the Sea of Ceneroth, or the Sea of Tiberias, or sometimes just called the Sea.

And if you've been there, you know it's a pretty large lake, 12 to 13 miles long, about seven miles wide, and it's below sea level. And it's fresh water, and there's all kinds of hills there. And basically, the Jordan is above it and below it, and I guess there's a current in the middle of the sea.

And you've got a bunch of towns back in the Bible days around this beautiful lake, and there's a lot of fishing going on. What did Mark Twain say about the Sea of Galilee in 1867? In the starlight, Galilee has no boundaries but the broad compass of the heavens.

It is a theater meet for great events, meet for the birth of a religion able to save a world, and meet for the stately figure appointed to stand upon its stage and proclaim its high decrees. But in the sunlight, one says, is it for the deeds which were done and the words which are spoken in this little acre of rocks and the sand 18 centuries gone that the bells are ringing today in the remote islands of the sea and far and wide over continents that clasp the circumference of the huge globe?

Mark the Twain. The word Kenor means, that's where we get one of the names of the Sea of Galilee, it means harp, and so is it shaped like a harp? Is it beautiful like a harp? One thing we know, though, for sure, Jesus is standing there and the crowd starts to press in on him over and over and over.

Of course, Jesus has been preaching. He's been doing a variety of miracles, and people want to hear him. Mark chapter 3 is another illustration of this. And he told his disciples that the boat should not stand ready for him, that a boat should stand ready for him because of the crowd so that they would not crowd him.

Mark 4, he began to teach again by the sea, and such a very large crowd was gathered to him that he got into the boat in the sea and sat down, and the whole crowd was by the sea on the land. They were pressing in, literally lying upon him.

But they're right on him, and my guess is they're pushing him into the lake. As some of the people tried to push him off the cliff or the brow of the cliff in Nazareth, here they're pushing on him, trying to hear the gracious words which were coming from his lips.

Or, and or, they were pushing him because they wanted to be near to him so that he might touch them and miraculously heal them. Pressing in, lying on, heavy upon. This is language of a storm, pushing on, raging around, tempest.

One writer said metaphorically, to press upon, be urgent with entreaties, to continue with entreaties, as in Luke 23, where the crowds had no desire for compromise and thus refused to let Pilate's verdict stand, but were insisting over and over and over with loud voices that Jesus should be crucified.

As a horrible hurricane or terrible tempest would press upon, pressure, power, intensity, they wanted to hear the Word of God and or they wanted to be healed. Listening to the Word of God, the authority that Jesus spoke with was from God.

John chapter five, truly, truly, I say to you, you, here's my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life. I'm hoping they were there to hear the preaching and to hear the proclamation, because remember, it's one thing to be healed physically.

It's another thing to be healed as it were spiritually. You could be having a perfect body and then die in your old age, and then you can still go to hell. So we see this press, this push. I guess if you wanted to make any practical comment, you could say, do you want to hear the Word of God like that?

I guess you could say, if you're a pastor, do you want to make sure you preach the Word.

Of God?

We could probably go that route, but I don't think that's really the way we're supposed to preach this. There's a couple of boats by the lake, and the fishermen had gone out of them, and they were washing their nets.

And so what happens? Jesus gets into one of the boats, which was Simon's, and they push him out a little bit. J. Verna McGee said, every pulpit is a fishing boat, a place to give out the Word of God and attempt to catch fish.

Somebody called this a floating pulpit. There's a lot of cool pulpits. I like my pulpit, but I've seen some very, very impressive pulpits, and these pressing people forced Jesus to get into a boat. Two boats were lying at the edge of the lake.

Ever ask yourself the question, why does it say two boats? Well, because there are two boats. That's true. But one of the boats that Jesus got into was Simon's. I think this is purposeful, don't you? Of course it is.

You see God's purpose and his sovereign plan for Simon. And now he's in the water, pushed out a little bit, and of course, water carries sound very wonderfully. There has been studies around the lake where they found natural amphitheaters and places where you could transmit a human voice to not just hundreds, but thousands.

And you can study that in an article called The Acoustics and Crowd Capacity of Natural Theaters in Palestine. But that really doesn't preach. It's interesting. And these fishermen, they've been out, they're washing their nets.

And so these nets could get muddy. These nets could have moss on them. These nets could have, you know, fish stuck in them, sticks stuck in them, and they needed.

To be cleaned.

I guess you could have a pole and a hook like we do to fish, or you could have a net with weights and just throw it into the shallow water, and it would come down and be on top of whatever fish was there.

Or you could have a larger net, the washing net, and they call this a trammel net. And it's got three layers, and therefore you have to wash it. And you've got one writer saying the bottom of the trammel net was rigged with weights and the top with floats that created a vertical wall extending from the bottom of the surface.

Of the lake.

The net wall consists of three layers, two outer nets of wide mesh with a fine mesh between them. And so you've got a fish, and you've got a boat, and you've got this net. And I don't really understand this, but it says the fish could pass easily through the first net of wide mesh, but were held fast when in their drive to escape, they pushed the inner fine mesh net through the outer wide mesh net.

When the trammel net was hauled aboard the boats, fishermen recovered fish from the fine mesh bag protruding through the outer net. So you've got big holes, mesh, big holes. They swim through the big hole.

They now hit the mesh. They try to go forward, and then they push themselves into the other bigger net, and it creates like a little pocket, and they're stuck in there. Welcome to the angler hour. Another study Bible here says that net was probably about nine feet in diameter.

The two brothers were skilled in its use. It's coming from a Greek term where we get our word amphibious, describing something related to land and water. So named because the person using that it would stand on or near the shore and throw the net in a deeper water where their fish were.

See, I don't think that's... I think that's a smaller net that's cast by hand. So I don't really go for that. I'm thinking, all right, how do you catch fish? They say there's up to 300 fishing boats on the sea, Josephus said back in the first century.

And do you have a boat on one side of the net, a boat on the other side, and the boats work in tandem? Say, what does it have to do with anything? I have no idea.

I'm just talking.

Jesus Commands the Nets to Be Let Down

They finished speaking. He says, Simon, put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch. Now, I don't know what Jesus was talking about. Maybe this is the practical application to the sermon.

This is what people call the pop test for Peter, the pop quiz for Peter. Put out, singular, Simon, let down your nets.

Plural, I'm tired.

You're a carpenter. You're going to tell me what to do? Daytime. Fish see the nets in the daytime. That's why we have to fish at night. Our nets are washed. Jesus, you're pretty wise, but I don't think you know anything about fishing.

I guess he could have said any of those. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong people. Already tried it. We didn't catch any of the approximately 20 species of fish in the Sea of Galilee. It's kind of dumb, isn't it?

Fishing in the middle of the day. Drop down your nets in deep water in the daytime. The fish are going to see the nets. This is not going to work. Master, we toiled all night and took nothing, but at your word, I will let down the nets.

All this is a commissioning of Peter, James, and John, showing him who he is because we know what's going to happen, don't we? We know what's going to happen, don't we?

We do.

But we're out of time for right now. Mike Ebendroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry. Stay tuned, part two.