At Your Word

"And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch." (Luke 5:4)

Then the carpenter tells a professional fisherman how to fish. Understand the insult in it. Simon has done this his whole life, and his father before him, and a carpenter tells him to go into the deep water and let down the nets in the middle of the day, which every fisherman on that lake knew was the wrong time. They fished at night, in the shallows, when the fish come up. And Simon says the most honest sentence in the chapter. Master, we toiled all night and took nothing. He tells him. He will not pretend it makes sense.

But at your word, I will let down the nets. That is the hinge, and everything in Peter's life turns on it, and it is not a sentence of understanding. It is a sentence of obedience without understanding, which is a completely different animal, and far rarer.

At your word. Not because it makes sense. Not because you have a good feeling about it. Not because the conditions look right. Because he said so. Most of us will obey God once we can see why, once the plan has been explained to our satisfaction, but that is not faith, it is agreement. Faith is letting down the net in broad daylight, in the wrong place, in the very area where you are the expert and he appears not to be, for no reason but that he told you to. Do the thing he has said, even where it contradicts everything you know, and find out what he was doing in the deep.