Instagram Jesus Week 5: Devotional Day 3

DAY 3 – Wednesday

Daily devotional

Read

Mark 1:16-17

Ask

Our LifeGroup structure is directly shaped by Mark 1:17 “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” How does this verse help us understand how Jesus calls his disciples to make a head, heart, and hands commitment to follow him? Who is it who transforms the disciples to become fishers of men?

Reflect

One of the things I enjoy doing in my free time is jigsaw puzzles. My strategy when starting in on a puzzle is to familiarize myself with the picture on the box and see how the components fit together before focusing on the details of each piece.

There are three distinct pieces in the invitation of Jesus in Mark 1:17, yet like the pieces of a puzzle, we need to keep these pieces together to have a full picture of what it means to be a disciple. If you are in a LifeGroup, mostly likely you are already familiar with the names we use for these three main pieces: head, heart, and hands.

Head – Follow me

The first step in discipleship comes with a decision to follow Jesus. As we saw yesterday, the four fishermen Jesus initially offered the invitation to decided immediately to follow him as they were eager to know more about him. The process of learning more about who Jesus is doesn’t stop with the decision to follow him. It accelerates. We are able to learn more about Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit as we walk in faith.

Heart – and I will make you become

As we learn more about Jesus in following him, we are transformed. Yet this transformation is not of our own doing. It is Jesus at work in us. This transformation is a change of heart (check out Ezekiel 36:26). One Greek Lexicon (Bible dictionary) defines this transformation as “to experience a change in nature and so indicate entry into a new condition.”[1]

Hands – fishers of men

This is the new condition we enter into. We are called to be a people who reach out others with the Good News. We’ll talk more about what this looks like later, but for now I encourage you to begin thinking about ways in which you’ve noticed transformation in your life as you have followed Jesus.

[1] BDAG, s.v. “γ·Ω∑νομαι,” 198.