Fishers Of Men

“Now, when he had left speaking, he said unto Simon, Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught…And when they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed him.”—Luke 5:4, 11

This little Scripture that I read today is a splendid example of revealing truth by contrast. These men had been fishers all their lives. They has been trying to win in a big way ever since they started business. To get enough fish and sell them so they would have enough money for the rest of their lives was a dream. And here comes one who tells them how to cast their net and get it after they had toiled all night and taken nothing. At His command they cast the net, and enclosed such a multitude of fishes that nets were filled and the boat began to sink.

They were so surprised they did not know what to do, and Simon beckoned to the folks on the shore to come out and help him. They filled both boats. They had never seen such a miraculous draught of fish in their lives.

Here is the contrast. Just as soon as they saw this miracle, Jesus commands them to leave their nets and everything, and follow Him.

The truth, by contrast, is there for our instruction. It is this: Getting is not living. Bringing home a fortune is not life. Joy does not come simply from enclosing a great multitude of money, houses, lands, or possessions. That is not living—living is something you give out.

Peter started that day to live, and instead of going after fish for himself, after a fortune, he forsakes the great catch and follows Jesus to become a fisher of men. There, in the wealthiest hour of his life, he forsook all and followed Jesus. He lost his life to find the life of God.

That is the vision that men need in the awful day in which we are living; and it is an awful day. The war [World War I] is on us today because men have gotten the wrong theory of life. Germany spread the wrong theory, and it has gotten into our country, and is in our country yet. That theory is to make yourself strong enough to get. It is the old caveman idea—with a club in your hand to go out and get what you want. Educate and cultivate yourself to get. Sharpen all the tools of life to get success and joy and applause for yourself. “Make yourself fit to survive” is the slogan. You say, “Do you know how much that fellow has?” and think that is living because that fellow has gotten something.

We have an idea that the one who can build the biggest house and have the most living, but is absolutely the opposite with Christianity. Jesus teaches that a man lives when he begins to do something and deliver something, and give something. It does not make any difference how much man gets, it is how much he gives. I don’t care if a man gets fifty million dollars, I want to know whether he benefits anyone by giving out. If he holds on to it and does not have funds to give to help others, his possessions will back up and rot on him and he will go down with them, for they will rot him.

Solomon had everything. He was a master-hand—an artist in getting things coming his way. They were coming his way, all right, but he did not benefit anyone by his possessions. He lavished his wealth on horses and women and great houses and temples to his wives’ gods; and, when you have said it all about Solomon, with all his wealth, he never benefited anyone. He put the skids under himself and down he went with the whole of his possessions on top of him, crying, “All is vanity.”

You cannot benefit simply by getting; but if you get in order that you might give, that is all right. If I sit and eat and eat and eat just to please myself, without using that food as work fuel, it will back up and take me away before my time, as sure as you are living. A man who eats to produce something, by turning his energy loose, gets some benefit out of his dinner pail. The man who eats without work just poisons himself.

Here is a man who has worked all his life, hale and hearty at eighty years of age, while some young fellow who could sit down and order anything he wanted from lobster a la Newburg up or down and pay for it accordingly, dug his own grave with his teeth. Why? Because he did not work it off. It is a law of life that the man that simply keeps things to himself and holds them, cannot get any joy out of life—he cannot live. You cannot pass an examination on a book that you have read and did not intend to give it out. Your brain won’t hold it unless you intend to give it out; but if you intend to give it out, it will stick with you. If you read something and say, “I am going to tell that to my pal,” it will stick with you, otherwise it is gone. If you just have your own little selfish laugh at it, you cannot remember it; but if you think, “My pay will laugh at that,” you remember the story and can tell it to him.

It is a law of life—God has put it in the world, God has produced, God now is only asking men for a chance to give His life to them. God is a lavish giver, and His love flows out and never flows in.

Peter left the greatest draught of fish he ever had, turned it down to go fishing for men, and that was the joy of life. He started back in the fishing game when he backslid but there wasn’t any fun in fishing any more. I imagine that he said, “If I had fifty boatloads they would all stink.”

He stood by the fire, and was wretched because he was trying to save himself, and after the little maid had spoken, and the cock crew, he went out and wept bitterly. He saved himself all right, but when the cock crew, his poor old heart broke and he said, “Look at that, I was trying to shield myself and have cut myself off from the life giver.” Oh, if he had forgotten Peter and stood up for Jesus, wouldn’t he have felt good? If he had rushed into the crowd and one of the maids had said, “I believe you are one of them,” and he had said, “Sure, I’m proud of it,” great joy of flowing life would have filled his heart. If they had slapped him in the face, he would have had a medal put on his cheek where he was smashed for Jesus Christ.

You do not get anything out of life by trying to get. Most of the labor difficulties come from men’s philosophies, thinking they are going to be happy when they get something; but no, the most miserable people in the world today are people who have gotten what they want, and it turns to canker and rot.

I believe in men getting everything they can, not for the joy of getting, but for the joy of giving out. The kaiser has turned hell loose on the world because he wanted something and did not give a “rip” about anybody else—the Belgians, the French, or anyone. He got the idea that his people were fit people and Germany taught the survival of the fittest. The greatest thing that can come to America is a good, hard time, until some of the rich folks, living in luxury, just living for themselves, get down to hard pan and have to patch their clothes. Then we will get someplace and begin to talk about God, and turn the stream the other way and live.

People have had so much coming their way that they are ungrateful. The man who earned a little salary was thankful for it, and his family was saving, and they were living; but when wealth began to flow their way easily, his wife changed, he changed, their characters changed, their children went slipping to the devil. You do not get anything in life by someone giving you something, but by the joy of working for it and giving out to somebody else.

This war is going to change things, and thank God for it. I was scared to death about America, because of the touch-button age in which we are living and the luxuries we were having. I don’t mind luxuries if people will work them off, and appreciate them, and thank God for them, and go out and do something for somebody else. Easy money will back up and poison America, and we will dig our own grave with our luxuries.

I have known men to make millions of dollars, and it never touched the inside of their hearts, just like fellows who can put away beef-steaks and pies and it does not distress them a bit, because they go out and work them off. I have filled my stomach at the training table with everything I wanted, and got away with it, because I was producing on the football field and had to have it in order to do the work. I do not care how much a man has, if he is producing, if he is giving it out he will grind it through and put it out to someone else.

I do not care how much intelligence a man has, if he does not write a diploma and stick it in the hall and say, “See the size of my head this way, and look on the inside and see what I have.” We have lots of them stuck on themselves because of what they have put on the inside of their heads. I do not care how much they know, but how much they are giving to others to help solve their problems. We do not care how much a man makes, if he gives it out as he makes it, and in giving, he gets more benefit for it. Who cares how much intelligence a man has, if he does not stand around and say, “Admire me for my intelligence,” but helps other people.

We are supposed to benefit each other and help each other, and whenever we stop, it backs up on us and poisons us. Most men break between the age of forty and forty-five years, because they do not know how to stop eating. They have gotten into a swivel chair and begun doing office work, where they used to be active, and they eat the same kind of meals, and the poison backs up on them, and they are broken down at forty years of age. Businessmen break at an average of forty years of age. We have sanitariums all over the country filled with nervous wrecks, broken down because they kept on eating and did not have the necessary physical exercise, and their arteries hardened, and they had a stroke.

Jesus gave Himself, God gives Himself, He lavishes sunlight—did you ever think how little sunlight is used? God makes a great big ball of fire and sticks it up there, and yet only one ten millionth part of it is used for the earth, and the rest goes out into space. God goes on giving out all the time, producing one crop of hay after another, one clump of trees after another—more sun, more rain, all the time producing.

This is the teaching of this little story about the fish. I said I had begun to fear for my country because we were getting so many things, unearned passed on to the second generation. Father and mother had worked ahead of them, and when the children came, they had their schoolhouses, and it was easy to get to them, and colleges on every hand, and they did not have to work their way through; children did not have to wear patched clothes, and only get a pair of socks once in a while, but could have luxuries, and tailor-made suits and bonbons for the girls and have a swell time, and go to the devil on luxuries.

An editor down South came to one of our suppers while we were on our tour, looking for any kind of a burden we wanted throw on his back in connection with raising the money for the Salvation Army work in the trenches. He stood up to tell us his story, and he said that a few months after the war broke out, folks came around for some money for this, that and the other, and wanted the front columns of his newspaper, and wanted him to help them out and back them up.

He said to himself, “I haven’t got time for this. I have to make my living, and it isn’t right for them to come and ask me for the columns of my paper, and my money, and my time to see other men. I believe the United States ought to tax us, tax everybody alike, and put the money in one big lot and let the Red Cross, the YMCA, the Salvation Army, etc., take out of that pile, and relieve us of all the responsibility and trouble, of taking our time, and fooling around, begging folks for subscriptions and jeopardizing our business.

“I dipped my pen in vitriol and went to writing and shouting at everybody about this. I kept it up for a while, and one night when I went home to dinner, my wife looked across the table and said to me, ‘What is the matter with you?’

“I knew several things that were the matter with me, and was not going to confess anything until I knew exactly what she knew, so I evaded her question for a time, and she said again, ‘What is the matter with you?’

“‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

“‘Why have you been writing the way you have?”

“‘Oh, have you been reading my editorials?’

“‘I read one, that was enough.’

“‘Why, what was the matter?’

“‘Dear, you have a hot box.’

“‘A hot box?’

“‘Yes, when they get a hot box on the railroad, the heat makes the wheel and the axle come together and the wheel will not turn. You have a hot box in your head and the wheels need oiling. I thought I married a man who, through his writing and his editorials bore the burdens of others, and thought you were going to be a great editor, and here you are cheating the people out of a chance to sacrifice. In the circles in which we live and our friends are going to the devil, and you want to shield them from the only chance in the world they will have to sacrifice and do something for somebody else. Your brain has a hot box.’”

“‘What would you suggest?’

“‘That you go to Galveston for a vacation.’

“‘Why didn’t you say you wanted a vacation and not hint at me?’

“‘I am not asking it for myself, I want to help you.’

“‘All right, we’ll go.’

“I got down there and discovered there in the sand that I had five toes on each foot; I had almost forgotten that. The first thing I knew the moon came up, and I hadn’t seen the moon or the stars for a long time. I began to feel kind of natural, and one night, I was sitting on the porch with my wife watching the folks, and holding my wife’s hand (not to keep her from hitting me, but we were renewing our honeymoon), and we heard a familiar voice hammering away telling some women what they had to do, putting ginger into them and saying, ‘Don’t be lazy, but get down to business. We are in war.’

“I looked into the lobby, and there were seven tables filled with society women, and there was a little woman at the head telling them where they were to get off, and what they had to do, and what they had to come back with. Bless your heart, when I looked at that woman, who do you think she was? It was the leading society woman in our little town. All we had thought she was good for was to drink booze and show her form. She had led lots of girls to the devil because her husband had a lot of money, and she was showing her form in different kinds of dresses, drunk most of the time, and a lot of young society girls were following in her trail. She was a menace to every home in our town.

“As soon as it was over and she had sent her teams out to the various hotels, I shook hands with her, and she said, ‘Well, I have come to myself. How about you?’

“I didn’t know what she meant, and she said, ‘Oh, I am glad the war came on. I had a Dad that was worth something to America and to his town, and I came from people that did things for other folks, and I forgot all about it; but when this war came on and the women came to my house and told me I had been living for myself, and how it was backing up on me and was going to ruin my life and reputation, I switched around and began to change. You see there are no diamonds on my hands, and I am in a tailor-made suit, down to fighting weight and doing everything I can.'

“I got a revelation and said, ‘It isn’t my business to go and write editorials saying, “Keep away from us”; it is the greatest chance we have ever had to get out of this lazy living and luxurious life.’

“I went back home and said, ‘Come ahead and lay the burden on my shoulders, and take away from folks and prune the trees, and they will bear more fruit.’ That is what has come in our town, and men are having a chance to sacrifice, and are waking up to the fact that life is not what you get.”

The stories from the battlefield are making men ashamed as they read the newspapers and see the willingness with which men die, kiss their wives and children goodbye and go out in sacrifice. It is shaking men’s hearts, and they are waking up and saying, “Were we doing the right thing in getting?”

God knew we never could cash in on this fortune business. If Peter, James, and John could have stood there and had Jesus perform miracle after miracle for them, in shiploads of fish, they never would have amounted to anything. If Jesus had kept on performing miracles day after day every time they wanted fish, the first thing you know Peter would have been the worst drunken sailor around those wharves, and John and James would have gone to the devil also probably. But Jesus said, no doubt, “I could stand here and give you stuff, but I know it would ruin you if I did it.”

Some of you are holding it against God because every success has not come your way. Listen, life is not getting. Let Jesus come into your heart and convert you; and begin to live for God, not from the outside in, but from the inside out. Get what God Almighty can put into your bosom in the life of Jesus to give out to other folks. That is living, that is the joy of life, to have the wine of Jesus tingling through your fingertips and face and eyes out to serve somebody else, and you are living then. As you give, God gives back plenty to you.

Every time a man takes his food and lies down to rest, he wakes up a stronger man; and every man that gives in the name of Jesus Christ, and has Christ in his heart, and is giving out, every time he sacrifices, he only has more joy and more health in his soul. It is a joy to do it. If you are here discouraged, it is because you are cross-eyed and have the blues.

The cross-eyed condition of the soul, you know, is the place where you keep looking in and saying, “Poor me, I haven’t got what other people have—cannot do this and that—poor me.” You say to yourself, “Why, everybody else has a chance. I have not chance.” When we keep looking in, in introspection, we get the blues.

Oh, stop thinking about yourself and say, “Lord, did you come to seek and to save that which is lost?” When is a man lost? When he is getting for himself.

Life is to give, and Jesus comes in to save your soul from sin. Sin is what you try to get for yourself. All the temptation the devil ever gave you was to get something for yourself. What is stealing? Getting something for nothing. What are the dissipations of life? Trying to get something for yourself. Jesus said, “I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly” He gave out His life, and He puts that life on the inside of you, and that is what changes you. The possessions of life do not satisfy. Jesus said, “The birds of the air have nests, and the foxes have holes, but the son of man hath not where to lay his head,” and yet He was giving all the time. Everyone who came near Him got something, from the woman who touched the hem of His garment, to the soldier who asked for the healing of his absent servant; and if you touch Him, you will get something.

The minute you see you are on the way to hell and to perdition, down and out, poisoned because of the stream of life has backed upon you, because you wanted something for yourself; if you see that and say, “O, Jesus, convert me; change my heart; give me Thy Spirit, so I can stand up and give out your own water of life,” you will begin to live.

Say, why can’t you take Jesus into your heart today, and go back into the streets and offices and stores and say, “O, Lord, let me help somebody before the sun goes down tonight. Help me to pick up somebody’s burdens.” Jesus says, “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

A grumbler is always thinking about what he does not get, but a Christian about what he can give.