Well, I want to invite you to turn with me to John chapter 21. We're going to be looking at the entire chapter this morning. John chapter 21. And if you turn there, you'll notice that it is the very last chapter in the gospel of John. We've been in this gospel since the month of February, and today we finish it. We've reached the end of this gospel. And I wanted to preach through John as my first series of sermons here is the pastor at First Presbyterian Church, because I think there's no more important thing for us to do than to get into the eyes and to the life of an eyewitness who lived a day-to-day life with Jesus Christ. I mean, as we read and have discovered John's gospel, we're discovering this through the lenses of a person who was there as Jesus was preaching these things, as he was teaching these things, as he was performing all of these miracles. He was one of the disciples in the upper room where Jesus was bringing to bear those serious things pertaining to his death. And he saw the death of Jesus Christ. And he was there with feeders. He went into the empty tomb. And so there's no more important person that any of us could ever know than the person of Jesus Christ. Not just as a set of theological construct, but it intimately as a personal way. And we get to see Jesus throughout the whole Bible, of course, but especially through the eyes of an eyewitness such as John. And so my hope is that as we made our way through John, that Jesus is more treasured by you, and he is sweeter to you than he was at the beginning of this gospel when we started to go through it. And if that's been the case in your life, then this has been a huge success. But we're not done. We have one more chapter to explore this morning. And it's John chapter 21. So let's go ahead now and read it beginning in verse 1. After this, Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the sea of Tiberius. And he revealed himself in this way. Simon Peter, Thomas called the twin, Nathaniel of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples were together. Simon Peter said to them, I am going fishing. They said to him, we will go with you. They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the shore, yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, children, do you have any fish? They answered him, no. He said to them, cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some. So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because of the quantity of fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved, therefore, said to Peter, it is the Lord. When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment for he was stripped for work and threw himself into the sea. The other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, but about a hundred yards off. When they got out on land, they saw a charcoal fire in place to fish laid out on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, bring some of the fish that you have just caught. So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore full of large fish, 153 of them. And although there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, come and have breakfast. Now, none of the disciples dared ask him, who are you? They knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish. This was now the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? He said to him, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. He said to him, feed my lands. He said to him a second time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? He said to him, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. He said to him, tend my sheep. He said to him the third time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he had said to him the third time, do you love me? And he said to him, Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you. Jesus said to him, feed my sheep. Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted. But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands and go and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go. This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God. And after saying this, he said to him, follow me. Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them. The one who had been reclining at table close to him and had said, Lord, who is it that is going to betray you? When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, Lord, what about this man? Jesus said to him, if it is my will that he remained until I come, what is that to you? This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things and who has written these things. And we know that his testimony is true. Now, there are also many other things that Jesus did. Where every one of them to be written, I said to him, Lord, what is that to you? This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things and who has written these things. And we know that his testimony is true. Where every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen. This is God's Word to us this morning. One of the great privileges that I was able to enjoy in my life was spending the first two months after I graduated from college in the country of Israel. It was just a great privilege we got to see just about everything that there was to see. They have a completely different perspective on history in Israel. When we were taking our tour through the old city of Jerusalem, our tour guide said that anything that you see that predates 70 AD is considered old. Everything after that is new. It's a completely different perspective on history there. And you kind of gleaned that as you tour the country. Well, one of the great places that we got to visit was the Sea of Galilee. Or in this passage, it's called the Sea of Tiberius. It's the same thing. And you know, before you go to a new place, you haven't been before and you're anticipating visiting that place, you kind of have visions in your mind of what it's going to be like. What you expect it to be. And I was expecting to go to the Sea of Galilee and see this vast body of water. But really, when I got there, it was just a modest sized lake. I mean, it couldn't be even a quarter of the size of Lake Pogetrain. You can clearly see across it. And it's really a beautiful area. It's surrounded by mountains and rolling hills. And this was the area where Jesus fed the 5,000. You can look at the hills and just envision all those people there, and Jesus feeding them. It was the area where Jesus preached the sermon on the mount. And this was the lake. We got to go out on a boat, on this lake. And you're out on this water and you're thinking, this is the very water that Jesus walked on. And this is the water that Peter walked on. It's kind of a surreal experience being there. And this is where we are in the story. It's Peter. He's walked on this water. Jesus has walked on this water. And Peter is out there with several of his friends and the disciples. And they're out there fishing. Because that's what they do. They're fishermen. The resurrection had changed everything. It had changed how they understood God and who they were in light of who God was. The ordinary life went on. And they were fishermen. They had to go to work. And so it's the middle of the night. That's when fishermen typically would go out and fish. So they would have fresh fish to sail in the morning. And they would be out fishing, doing the ordinary thing. And that's what happens. It's ordinary life that continues to happen on this side of Christianity and on this side of the resurrection. Many of us expect and we are bothered by the fact that the Christian life is not always this mountaintop experience that we really desire it to be. It's not that just top of the heap emotional experience that we would desire that Christianity be. And the fact that that's the case sometimes makes us think that there's something wrong with us. That there must be something wrong with my heart if I'm just not constantly on the mountaintop in Christianity. But I think that when we look at Scripture, we discover that Christianity isn't always a mountaintop experience. You know, we do live on this side of the fall. We do live in a broken world. And we see that Peter's life is definitely not a mountaintop experience from here on out. So the point is this, who Jesus is and who He declares us to be. It's lived out in the ordinary things of life. In getting up in the morning and living with your family and going to school every day. And in going to work every day and doing the ordinary things. That's where Jesus meets us. That's where we live out who He says that we are in the gospel. That's where He is actually known to us because the rubber meets the road in those particular areas of life. And so Peter sees Jesus, Jesus shows up to Peter when he's having a relatively bad day at the office. He's out there in the middle of the night out on a lake, fishing, and they've caught nothing. Have you ever felt like that with your job? When you went out there and you stuck your line in the water and you worked all day long and you caught nothing. Maybe except for a piece of junk and just the hopelessness and the discouragement that that brings. That's the place where Peter is in this story. He's just in that place of doing the ordinary job and not having anything to show for it. But somehow in the midst of the early morning this person shows up along the shore and says, Hey, why don't you cast your net out on the other side of the boat? And they do it. And so many fish jump into this net that all of those guys, I mean there's several of them mentioned here in this passage. All of those guys are not strong enough to lift up that net full of fish and put it back into the boat. And then Peter discovers that this person who told them that there were fish on the right side of the boat is actually the person of Jesus. And so in true Peter fashion and just his unhinged zeal, he jumps out of the boat and swims to the shore. It completely reminds me of that scene in Forest Gump, right? Where Forest is on his shrimp boat and he sees Jenny on the side of the shore, his true love. And so the boat continues to make its way across the bay but he literally jumps off the boat which just so happened to be called the Jenny. He had six of them called the Jenny and he swims to shore to be with his true love, the one to whom his heart has deep affection for. It's amazing what you will do to be with someone who has grabbed your heart. And I think that what we see here in Peter is that he wanted to be with Jesus more than he wanted anyone or anything else in the world. More than anyone in the world or anything in the world he wanted to be with Jesus and he was even willing to embarrass himself to go be with him. He couldn't wait just to steer the boat back to shore, that would take too long. So he jumps in the water and he swims to be with him. To me it's always such a moving scene to turn on the news at night and see a bunch of our military servicemen returning from deployments, getting off the ship or getting off the airplane and they're coming down those stairs and they're anticipating seeing their families, their wives and their children who they haven't seen for several months. And you can tell by the body language the facial expressions in these men and women that they're just so thrilled to be reunited with one another. It's a hard life to go dodge bombs and bullets in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's more difficult and painful than I could ever begin to imagine and I admit to you that I don't appreciate it as I should. But after being in the midst of that difficult life coming off of that plane or off of that ship there's such a beauty and being reunited. And I think what is it that gets them through those days and weeks and months of being a part of having to dodge the bullets in the Middle East or having to be a mother who basically becomes a single mother during that particular time? Who may give birth to a child without her husband being there? What is it that gets them through that? And what gets them through that is the anticipation that someday soon they will be reunited that they will be back together. Those dark and lonely perilous days will be through and they will be back together as a family just as it should have been. I think there's a great parallel between that picture and what Christianity is like or should be like because Christ-centered gospel saturated Christianity begins to look like that. In the midst of the difficult life that we go through in the midst of a world that produces all sorts of thorns and thistles it's those things that make us long for our Savior. The struggles that we go through are designed for the express purpose to say there is someone who has accomplished a much greater peace than you're ever going to experience in this world. And it's your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, your only hope in life and death and those sufferings and those pains and those times of darkness and loneliness are meant to get you to long to be with Him. Above all things in life in the midst of the junk of life we can remember that He has fought for us to the very point of His death, that He has risen again so we have the hope that one day we would rise again too, that we would have the hope that the destruction of death and the consequences of sin would one day be conquered. And He sits there right now at the right hand of God, right now at this very moment while you're sitting here listening to me, He is sitting at the right hand of God, pleading your case, continuing to fight for you. And we have that hope that one day He will write every wrong and He will bring us in to His perfect peace. And it's because of that that we can look upon the successes and the victories of our life and not put too much hope and too much joy in those things and that we can go through our failures and defeats without going into the pit of despair because we know that Christ has risen and He's made Himself known to His people and He's accomplished heaven for us. It makes us want to long to be with Him, to long to be with Him and it means that when you're longing to be with Him, that you want to see things with His eyes. You start to have that desire, that you want to hear things with His ears, that His weightiness starts to influence everything that you say and everything that you do. And you're long to be satisfied with Him more than you're long to be satisfied with all of the stuff of this life. That means that you want your life to look like His and maybe if you don't want your life to look at it like His, at least you want to want your life to look like His. And it means that you start taking the measures to get there, to enjoy Jesus Christ, to rest in Him just as you take the measures, as our military men and servicemen and women do, to get to a pay phone in Baghdad or somehow get some kind of internet link in Kabul so they can somehow commune and have the joy of being with their family even though they're apart from them. Maybe your heart's not there yet. Maybe you don't have that inward desire to really know and cherish and be satisfied with Jesus more than you're satisfied with anything else in the world. If that's the case, I want to tell you that's okay, admit that. I want this church to be a safe place where you can come and say, I don't have a desire that I should have. But the question is this, are you ready to repent of that lack of a desire? Are you ready to have that inward affection for Jesus Christ? Are you ready to get back there? Do you want to be with Jesus? If the answer to that question is no, I don't, then I would challenge you to consider whether or not you know Jesus Christ in the first place. Because if you don't at least want to want to be with Jesus, then there's something unsettling about that, isn't it? It's telling you that you put your hope and your trust in your faith and your dependence upon something else that has promised to save you from some kind of a hopeless life. But at the end of the road, you're going to find that not to be the case. And there's no more hopeless place on planet earth to be than to be without Jesus, without resting in Him. And so, that's a warning, but it's an encouragement that grace is still there to be had, to flee to the cross. And if you're a person here this morning, who at least at the very least wants to want to be with Jesus, then the encouragement that I have for you is that there is great hope. There is great hope, this God that you believe in is powerful, and He has not left us on our own. We're not solitary individuals, He's given us His Spirit, He's promised to bless you and to keep you, and you're not here on your own strength. So He's not only given us His Spirit to comfort us, and to equip us, and to empower us through the dangers and toils and snares of this life, but He's also introduced us to His people. He's introduced us to His church, which is where He has designed us to live and to grow. The fact of the matter is, my friends, is that the church is God's divinely orchestrated discipleship program. It is the context in which we live and grow and are used to experience His grace. So if you're a person who at least wants to want to be with Jesus, then my challenge to you practically is this, connect yourself to the church. Connect yourself to God's people, participate in what the church has to offer in order to help you grow to love Jesus, and to help you grow to treasure Him above all things. And ask for help, and knit where you are and ask for help to grow in grace by someone who you know who may have a deeper level of maturity than you do in the faith. Get involved in the lives of people. When you became a Christian, you were given spiritual gifts, and you're robbing the church of those gifts if you're not living out your life in the context of the church, and you're robbing yourself of the gifts of others by detaching yourself from the church. See, the challenge is this also, don't go through life with this completely bizarre and unbiblical notion that you can somehow grow to treasure Jesus Christ when you are completely detached from His people, or only very superficially attached to His people. He saved us into Himself, but He saved us into His church, and we need each other more than we recognize it. The discipleship, my friends, at the very least is our desire to want to want to be with Jesus, and to be with His people to help us to grow. It's our Christ initiating grace dependent endeavors by which we seek to know Jesus Christ, and as we come to know Him, and as we come to follow Him, He begins to use us. He begins to aid us and work within us to make an impact for Him, regardless of how messed up we may be. I think, as you read this passage, and you see Peter catching 153 fish. It's a lot of fish, and I think you have to read that in light of the first time that Jesus came to Peter and said, follow me. Do you remember that? If you read back in Matthew 4, Mark 1, you see that Peter, again, is doing ordinary life. He's fishing. Jesus comes up to me, and he says, follow me, and I will make you a fisher of men. It's obviously figurative speech, but what Jesus is saying to Peter is that He is going to provide for Him the basis, and the power, and everything else that He would need to go, and to seek out loss, unbelieving, rebellious, and different people, and point them to Jesus Christ and give them the hope of the gospel and of the salvation that He brings. And Jesus promises Him that some will be found, that there will be a great catch, that they will be brought into the gospel net that will never break. And your evidence of that, my friends, if you believe the gospel, you have been brought into that gospel net, it will not break, which means that you will not be lost. You won't be caught, and then weasel your way out of it again. He has saved you completely, those who know Him, who rest in Him alone. And what he's saying to Peter is that his life is going to be about that. His life is going to be about bringing the gospel to these people so that they would know and believe Jesus. And he says that to a man who is just a colossal failure in every manifestation. I love Peter, because I see so much of myself in him, and I think that if you're honest, you'll see yourself in him too. Just someone who is rebellious, who's foolish, who was doing what he was doing, and Jesus had to say to him, get behind me Satan. That was probably not Peter's greatest day of self-esteem, and that's the words that he heard from Jesus Christ. He said that he would never betray Jesus, and shortly thereafter I might add, three times he betrays him, says that he doesn't even know Him. He's a failure in every way, and as you read on in the New Testament, you're going to see that he imbibes these legalistic notions about food laws that's going to get him rebuked by the Apostle Paul. You know, Peter is a mess up, and you're a mess up, and I'm a mess up. A lot of people will admit that they are these things, that they are sinners, that they fall short of the glory of God, that they have deceitfulness in their heart, but it all remains in a general sense. We don't see the specific areas where we fail, as well as we should, and when we read about Peter, we see that these things are specific. They've been recorded for posterity. 2000 years later, we're still reading about the specific sins of Peter. How would you like that to be your life? That's Peter right there. But you know what? Jesus still calls him. He still uses this broken, worthless seemingly clay pot, and says he's not worthless. He still has this great high call on the life of Peter, on the life of a man who is just a first class screw up. And he's saying that Peter is going to have this evangelistic, missional call to be a Fisher of Men. That's one side of the equation, but he gets this other commission as well in this story, and it is that he is being called to spiritually nurture and feed God's people. Many of you know this story. It's very familiar to you that we just read where Jesus asked Peter three times, do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me more than these? And each time Peter says, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. But the third time he's a bit discouraged. Imagine that you actually truly do love your children or your wife or your husband, but maybe they seem to express doubt by re-asking you that. And it hurts your soul because you really do love them. And that's how Peter feels here. He says yes, Lord, I love you. But Jesus says at the response of the love that Peter gives to Jesus, feed my sheep, feed my lambs, tend to my sheep, nourish them. This is a beautiful picture here, my friends, of complete restoration. You can't mess up in a more ugly way than Peter messed up, and yet he has this repentant heart. His heart is divided, but it repents, and it steers towards Jesus Christ. That's how he handles his sin. The problem with our sin is not so much that we do it. It's how he responds to it, and he responds to it by pointing himself back towards Jesus Christ. Jesus has essentially called Peter here to the pastorate, to the office of ministry, to be a fisher of men and evangelist, and to be someone who feeds the sheep, someone who disciples people. It's a special commission that he's given to Peter, that not all men have. It's a special commission that he gives to him. And I should tell you that this is kind of the point in the text and the point in the sermon, where it becomes really awkward for me. This is an awkward point, because I am your pastor, and I love you. I go to bed at night thinking about you, and I wake up in the morning thinking about you, and you are who I live and breathe. You come in second to my wife and my daughter, but you're a second, and that's pretty high up the totem pole on the whole grand scheme of things. My life is this church, and the reason why I think about you, and I pray for you, and I mull over things pertaining to this church, is because for some reason, unbeknownst to me, God has called me, and he has called the other elders of this church, for the special task of leading you to him, of leading you to Jesus Christ, to keep you from falling off the cliff, to keep you treasuring Jesus above all things, the one who is really the ultimate shepherd of your souls. And he's done that in my life, and he's done that in the lives of the other elders of this church, not because we have it all figured out, so I'm up here to tell you how I've got it figured out, so you can get your life figured out. That's not it. He's done it despite the fact that very often, I feel like I should just be elected as the mayor of Dufusville. Because my heart is so depraved, I don't know why he has chosen that, but that's what he's done. And I think it's an important job for myself, and for the other elders of this church, to shepherd your souls. That's what we're called to, to nurture you, and to lead you back to him. But I think the reason why it's a little bit awkward is because a really important point here out of this that we can glean is that it's important to follow your overseers, to follow your elders, to follow your pastor, to follow your undershoppers as they lead you to the true shepherd. You know, you can do that just in a practical way. You can do that just by treasuring Jesus Christ, by following Him, by tuning into His Word as it's read and preached and sung and prayed. By living that out on the implications of your life, by submitting yourself to the preaching and teaching of the Word, by resisting the temptation to check out of worship and life together here, by asking Him to empower you to live out the implications of that in your life, and to live peaceably with one another in the church, to fight for unity, and to really love each other, and value each other. And in the wisdom of God, He's called pastors, and He's called elders, to be leaders in His church, because we ultimately need them. We need these men to help us to lead us back to Jesus Christ. It's a special calling, but I think there's also something else we can get out of this as well. All of us have a general calling to do many of these functions as well, to be fishers of men, to go out and seek our neighbors, and to seek our friends who do not know Him, and to point them to Jesus Christ, and to, in the life of the church, be pointing each other to Christ and back to the gospel. In fact, pastors are called to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, and so it's our responsibility to equip you, but it's your responsibility to do that. It means that you have a privilege, and you have the ability, because you've been gifted, to provide some measure of care for one another, some sort of spiritual nurture for one another. In other words, the point is this, it is not the role of the professional pastor to be doing all of the ministry in the church. You have been gifted to be able to provide that, in some measure, to somebody else, to point someone to Jesus Christ. You know, not too many people are going to accuse first Presbyterian church of Balexi, Mississippi, of imbibing the entertainment culture that's so common in the evangelical church in America. And this is not probably going to be your first impression of things here, but I want to suggest to you that if your idea of church is to sit back passively and do this, and just take in with no output there, then you've imbibed the entertainment culture. Because entertainment is completely passive. You've imbibed the consumer culture. The work of the minister is not to provide a consumer product and to keep you entertained as to point you back to the essentials of who Jesus is and why he matters for your life. And if you know anything about that, my friends, then you have the privilege and the responsibility to participate in that kind of ministry to one another. Because we need each other. That's what the priesthood of the believers tells us. And you know what? It's really a commission to die to yourself. When Jesus gives Peter this commission here, he says that he's going to end up dying for Jesus Christ. When he says these words, stretch out your hands, he means stretch out your hands, just as Jesus did. That he would be crucified one day. And in fact, Peter was crucified just as Jesus was only upside down because he would not allow himself to be crucified in the same way. And he did that. He gave over his whole life for Jesus Christ. The famous German Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhopper wrote in his landmark book that I'd recommend to all of you, the cost of discipleship. He said that when Christ bids a man come, he bids him come and die. Following Jesus Christ, my friends, means that you say Jesus, you can have it all. And it's not something that just pertains to your private life. It pertains to our life together. And I know that you go through seasons of life where you're going to be less able to be connected with one another. But the question is, is there some capacity in what you can do that? If you are an older woman in this church, and by older woman, I mean that there's some female in this church younger than you. What Paul says to Titus is that you have a privilege of being able to invest your life in younger women and in younger girls to impart the truth and the grace of the gospel to them. The same is true for men to connect with one another and impart the truth and the grace of the gospel to them. And it's simple. It's organic. You don't have to go to seminary to do this. You don't have to be a scholar to do it. It's about living the Christian life in a context of relationship with one another. And so I wonder how Jesus can have it all in my life and how he can have it all in your life by investing yourself in someone here. Why is that so important to invest yourself in the life of another Christian here in this church? Because Jesus is so glorious. It's because he's such a treasure. He's such a source of everlasting peace. The only source of it. The only source of true delight. And that's so much the case that all the books written in the entire world could not contain his beauty. He's more valuable than gold. He's more necessary to you than food and drink. He's more majestic than the highest mountains and the most vast oceans. And you need him more than you need air. You were created by him and you were created for him. And you're never going to be authentic and truly human as you were designed to be until you start living your life for his sake and following him. So as we leave here this morning, as we go into Christmas, let's ask that he would mold us and make us as he would have us to be. Let's pray that now as we come to him. Oh Father, what a great privilege we've had to spend time in this gospel. We thank you that we can read your word and know that we're coming face to face with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that he's speaking to us straight from it by the power of the Holy Spirit. And my prayer this morning is just that our hearts would be sensitive to what this word has to say, that we would be open to your work in our lives to change us and mold us and make us to conform us into the people that you've called us to be. We're going to be so much more delighted and so much more content is that's the case, but not only that you are going to be made to appear beautiful and that's what we long to see in our church. And that's what we long to see in our city and that's what we long to see in the church all throughout the world. So cause that to happen. We pray it in Jesus' name and for His sake. Amen.