All of life's affairs will teach us lessons profitable throughout its future, if we will receive them. Perhaps there was something peculiarly helpful in the fishing business—something peculiarly like the great work in which the Apostles were to engage the remainder of their lives. Our Lord intimates this in His call. Fishing requires energy, tact, proper bait and that the fisherman keep himself out of sight. And these four things are requisites in the spiritual fishing in which the Lord privileges us to engage. We are to remember that as fish are easily alarmed when they find that anyone wishes to take them, so humanity is shy of being captured by anything, especially if they have the least suspicion that they may lose their liberties; and thus consecration appears to the world.
As fishermen, we must be watchful, active, temperate, persevering, self-oblivious, tactful and lovers of symbolic fish and fishing. We must be equipped with proper language, the Truth, knowledge of human nature, versatility and imperviousness to disagreeable surroundings. We must seek to "catch men" at all seasons, inside and outside the churches. We must use the hooks of justification and consecration, and the bait of such truths as will appeal to the taste of the symbolic fish. Great care must be exercised as to how we cast in the hooks and lines, and as to how we act before and during bites as well as in drawing the symbolic fish in and in stringing them, if we would "catch men" for the Lord.
Ex. 28:1; 1 Sam. 3:4-10; 1 Chron. 23:13; Isa. 6:8-10; Matt. 4:18, 20-22; 9:9; Luke 10:1, 2; John 1:43; Rom. 10:14, 15; 2 Cor. 5:18-20; Heb. 5:4; Matt. 10:7, 11-13, 16, 25, 27, 28; 28:19, 20; Luke 24:48.
