This miracle led to tremendous self-awareness and repentance, and Peter dropped to his knees and said, ‘Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.’ Now that is a picture of a child of God, somebody engaged in gospel work. Perhaps that person has been characterized by complacency and coldness, and then at last they come to really trust Christ and to live as a Christian ought to live: to pray and toil, and a blessing comes and oh what an awareness they have of how far away they have been once. There is repentance and yieldedness following this great blessing. When blessing comes at one and the same time it humbles us and makes us all the more repentant of our shortcomings, and it leads us into greater fellowship with the Lord.
Do we need a something like a miracle of blessing to wake us up? Are there some of us who are coming into the Lord's house and going through the motions of worship, but we are not really receiving any great blessing or instrumentality; we almost need a great blessing to shake us, to humble us, to make us order our priorities aright and to bring us into real fellowship with the Lord. How many of us perhaps are living as half Christians, and we need as the disciples were to be called once again to pray and to serve and to witness for him? In his time we will receive a great blessing which will not only be a blessing for others whom we reach out to but it will be a great blessing for our own souls these two miracles are telling us to prove the mighty power of God.
You can tell people about Christ; you can explain the gospel and the way of salvation. You can have the most interesting discussions, and the discussion goes to and fro. ‘But what about this’, they will say, and you try to answer the question; ‘But what about that?’ People will rehearse their doubts and their misgivings, and you try to answer, but it's an intellectual discussion. It's not touching the heart. The person who is inquiring is really trying to defend themselves against your witness: they have no sense of God. This is all theoretical. Perhaps this is how it was with PeterSo it was with Peter. He was interested in the message of the Messiah. This could be our great deliverer, our great political reformer. He was interested in moral reformation too, but he had no sense of God. That was the first stage of real conversion: a sense of God that he had never had before. Then suddenly, this becomes serious. This is my eternal future; this is the God to whom I'm accountable, and there is a new atmosphere that surrounds every discussion, every question. It's a work of the Spirit of God. Peter, the future apostle, has it now. And he falls on his knees. He is filled with fear. ‘I am unfit. I am unworthy. I am a sinful man.’ Pray to God if you have never had any sense of his reality.
It is remarkable that Simon Peter, and probably all the apostles, did not come to full belief in Jesus Christ instantly, immediately. It took them a little while to really understand, to really see their spiritual need and what it is that they must do. The evidence of the New Testament is that Peter came to the Lord in stages, his mind being opened step by step, and it is very helpful to look at the stages of the life of the apostle Peter. It helps us to see his pilgrimage, his progress, that he understood one thing after another before really he wholeheartedly gave himself to Jesus Christ and came to know him and to walk with him. He was a disciple, yes, from an early stage with loyalty, but it took a while before he understood and was saved. This part of his life in Luke chapter 5 was not the first time he met with Jesus Christ. His first encounter with Christ is recorded in the beginning of John's Gospel, where Peter’s brother Andrew was a disciple of John. There was that great day when John saw Christ and cried out, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world’, and Andrew was one of two disciples who followed the Lord Jesus Christ. He was so convinced that he was the Messiah that he went and fetched his brother Simon Peter. He also, to a great degree, was convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. But those disciples had been taught by the Jewish clergy that, when Messiah came, he would be a political leader who would deliver them from the Roman occupying power. So when this Jesus of Nazareth was pointed out by John the Baptist as being the Messiah, it didn't seem very likely. He came as an ordinary man, as a poor man; he was meek in manner and gentle. He wasn't a strident kind of person, an extrovert, a great leader for those times. They didn't understand that he was engaged on a spiritual mission, that he would suffer and die in the place of sinners as Isaiah had declared. Nevertheless, there were many things about the Saviour of the world, even in those earliest days, that deeply impressed them. They had never known anyone quite like him. He was perfect; he was holy; he never lost his temper; he was never unreasonable. He was so profound in his teaching, in his manner, and of course all too soon, they were to witness tremendous miracles.
There may be people who experience all the stages of seeking and finding God in a single hour, in a single night. There are many people who come directly to Christ and by the work of God in their hearts they see the whole issue and they see their need and they understand the way of salvation, not because they are bright but because God so works in their lives. But for many people it will take a while before they really see the whole point; it's something that happens over a period of time, maybe a fairly short period of time, but there are discernible phases and stages. Strictly speaking conversion itself is never in stages. It is a very sudden event, but to bring us to the point of real trust in Christ, of being dependent upon him for salvation, can take time.