“I’m going out to fish,” Simon Peter told them, and they said, “We’ll go with you.” So, they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

John 21:3

For Meditation

It was the first time I had the opportunity to work in an office in New York with my college degree. Justly, I was delighted. I went home from the interview, joyfully expecting the dawn of Monday to start work. I had been laid off from the hotel I worked with some weeks earlier and things were hard for me, particularly, with the birth of our second daughter. Strangely that same evening, I had a call from the hotel to come back for a night position. I quickly compared the salaries and decided to return to the hotel as a bellhop. I can see your face as you read this. You are going like, “What!”

That was lunacy, I know. But those were my foolish days without Christ. Like the Israelites in the wilderness who cried to go back to the “pots filled with meat and ate all the bread we wanted” in Egypt (Exod. 16:3), I went back to my Egypt when Canaan, with all its “milk and honey,” waited to welcome me.

Sometimes, we, the redeemed of God, act in the same way. The disciples did the same at the Sea of Galilee (Jn. 21:3). It may not have been an act of giving up on the Lord and the apostolic call on their lives. Rather, it may have been a desire for filling their meantime with something useful they knew to do. The Rabbis of their time did that quite well, like Paul’s tent-making.

Their woeful failure must have been providential. Jesus met them at the shore of their disappointment. They confessed their failure (5). As Lockyer puts it, “It is well that the confessions of man’s poverty should go before the incomings of the riches of God’s bounty and grace” (All the Miracles of the Bible, Herbert Lockyer, pg. 249).

Jesus told them to throw their net on the right side. They did, and they had such a great catch, they could not haul in (Jn. 21:6). At that, John’s eyes were unveiled. “It is the Lord!” he said to Peter. I am sure Peter remembered the day the Lord called him at the same location (Mk. 1:16-18). He jumped into the water towards His Master (Jn 21:7).

Their unsuccessful night toil proved to them that there was nothing in their former life for them again. They were now fishers of men, and that must be their only vocation and engagement – their new life and ministry.

The experience of the disciples is our example and warning. Do not look back or relish anything in your life before Christ. There is nothing there for you but failure, heartbreak, and pain.