Devotions with Pastor Dick Guilfoil

Mark 1:17
“Come, follow me, Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.”
“In the life of a saint there is this amazing wellspring of original life all the time; the Spirit of God is a well of water springing up, perennially fresh. The saint realizes that it is God who engineers circumstances, consequently there is no whine, but a reckless abandon to Jesus.” --- Oswald Chambers

The ‘actualities’ of life, those circumstances of the present moment randomly appearing out of the chaos of life, are the direct by-product of the ‘engineering God’, who creates circumstances in which your ‘follow Me’ must take place. You will be tempted in your ‘following Him’ to ignore the ‘actualities’ of your circumstances, attributing those ‘actualities to random chaos’, conditions resulting from ‘something’, ‘anything’ but the hand of God, rendering this ‘present moment’ void of meaning and purpose, destined to be merely endureduntil calmer fishing conditions appear. However, every present moment has been precisely engineered, ushering in perennially fresh moments for the Spirit of God.

Jesus is very clear about the intention of the engineered random chaos that God has orchestrated in your ever-present moment. Your random actualities, engineered with the precision of the master engineer, arising out of the chaos, are nothing more, nothing less, than the creation of the perfect storm in which the fishing of men can best take place.

Your false assumption,

• Fishing cannot take place in these actualities in this perfect storm, falls by the wayside;
• Replaced with the reality that ‘fishing in the storm of your actualities’ is precisely what God has intentioned all along.
• This is the ‘perfect storm’.

In that ‘perfect storm’ you will be tempted to ‘whine’, “I cannot fish in seas like this!” Of course not.

• Only Jesus can enable you to ‘fish’ in these present circumstances
• In the storm you are now in.

That is precisely what He promised, “I will make you fishers of men”.
The flash of insight arrives yet again, fishing for menrarely occurs in calm waters.
Instead, it is the perfect stormthat prepares both the fishermanand the fish.

So Jesus said to Peter, “Come.” So Peter got down out of the boat”….Matt. 14:29

Pastor Dick