Launching Out into the Deep
J. Baldwin Brown, B. A. Luke 5:4 Now when he had left speaking, he said to Simon, Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught. We have toiled in the narrows too long, and have taken little by our toil. Look round you in this nineteenth century of Christendom, and survey what ought to be a kingdom of heaven. We must launch out into the deep, the great human deep, which is in Christ's dominion, and not in the devil's, and let down our nets for a draught. We have learnt wisdom perhaps from our faults, our follies, our failures. The Church has toiled in the shallows surrounding her coasts among the souls she could get within her pale. But rarely has man, in his simple human relations and activities, been suffered to feel that as man he was dear to Christ, and a subject of His kingdom. The great evangelical movement began with a noble attempt to fulfil this command. The evangelists saved our State. Voltaire wrote to d'Alembert, when the revolutionary yeast was beginning to work: "We have never pretended to enlighten the cobblers and the maid-servants; we leave that to the apostles." In a few years those cobblers and maid-servants were flooding the gutters of Paris with the best blood of France; while in England the apostles had tamed them. But the evangelical movement, as the years passed on, shut itself up more and more to its Churches, and treated the great human world, the world of secular thought, activity, and interest, as quite outside its pale. Christ points us to the broad ocean, the great human deep — the relations, the energies, the industries, and the interests, the thoughts, and the sympathies of men, in their physical, intellectual, social, and political life; these we claim for His kingdom, these be it ours to win to His love. Instead of saving souls out of the world, let us save the world with the souls in it. (J. Baldwin Brown, B. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Now when he had left speaking, he said unto Simon, Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught. WEB: When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep, and let down your nets for a catch."