A Call Worth Paying Attention To

I don’t know if you’ve ever had trouble with spam robocalls on your phone, like I have, but it is so annoying. I signed up for the National “do-not-call” registry, but I continue to receive these calls. I have a special spam filtering app on my phone, but I still get the calls. When I see that unknown number on my phone, I have a decision: to answer or not to answer. When I pick up the call and hear that tell-tale robotic recording, I cannot shake my disappointment. I don’t even listen, I just hang up as soon as possible. It’s not worth paying attention. But when someone I know and love calls, I do my best to drop everything to pick up that phone call.  Some calls are worth ignoring while others are worth paying attention to. 

As Jesus walks beside the Sea of Galilee near Capernaum, he encounters two pairs of brothers at work in their fishing busines. Both Simon Peter and Andrew, as well as James and John, are not poor. They are, in a sense, salt of the earth, hard-working folks, but they have a clearly established family businesses from what we see here and elsewhere. Whether they have heard Jesus before or not, we cannot know decisively from Matthew’s account, but there are two striking aspects of their encounter with Jesus. 

The first of those is the decisive call of Jesus…the call of discipleship. Jesus comes upon them by the lake and says, “Follow me…and I will send you out to fish for people” (Matthew 4:19). We can assume this first call to Simon Peter and Andrew was echoed in the same call to James and John. While the word “disciple” or “discipleship” is not used here, what we have in Jesus’ encounter with these four men is an exemplary picture of what real discipleship involves. 

It involves following Jesus and joining Jesus in His mission. Notice that Jesus calls Peter, Andrew, James, and John to immediately follow Him, to make a clean break with their previous life, and to absolutely dedicate themselves to Him as their new rabbi. They must “follow” Him in the sense of walking behind their teacher but also in learning to take on the life of that their teacher prescribes as the true life with God. Discipleship involves following Jesus by shaping our lives around His life and teaching.

Along with Jesus’ decisive call to these men, the second striking aspect of this encounter is the swiftness of these men’s response to Jesus. “At once,” Matthew tells us, Simon Peter and Andrew “left their nets and followed him” (4:20). You can feel the urgency of this change and shift in their lives. This urgency only feels stronger with James and John who, we are told, “were in a boat with their father, Zebedee, preparing their nets and immediately left the boat and their father and followed him” (4:22).

There is a decisive call to discipleship by Jesus and there is a swift response to become disciples by these first four men. Some calls are worth paying attention to, yes, but also swiftly responding to.

Deep questions come to us through this story:

• Are we following Jesus as our rabbi, teacher, and Lord? 
• Have we forsaken all us to know Him?
• Are we hearing His teaching and letting it change everything about us?
• Have we dedicated ourselves to His truth or does something else still reign in our lives?