Daily Bible Reading 17th May 2026 // Luke 5:1-11
1 On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, 2 and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. 4 And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” 5 And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” 6 And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. 7 They signalled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” 9 For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, 10 and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” 11 And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.
The call to Christian consecration, to true discipleship, then, is a call to cast off from shore, to leave the shallows for the deeps. There are different kinds of shallows in spiritual life. There are mental shallows, in which many are content with a superficial understanding of the gospel. They will not go deeply into the mysteries of the Word. They live on their emotions, on fits and starts and moods, but seldom exercise their minds in understanding God's Word. In so doing, they are disobeying that Word, which tells us clearly that we are to love the Lord our God with all our minds, as well as with all our heart. Half the problems that beset the lives of Christians would be solved almost overnight if they were prepared to think intelligently about them, instead of reacting emotionally to them.
Then, there are the moral shallows. There are those who fail, or refuse, to let the great, deep doctrines of the Word touch them at the heart and root of their being. They have been content with a superficial transformation, a cleaning up of the outside of their lives. But salvation is a moral transformation within, in the deep places of the being; and when the discipline of the Word has not been allowed to do its work there, a man is living in moral shallows, and he remains from the spiritual point of view, stunted.
And there are the spiritual shallows. When a man is living mentally and morally in the shallows, his spiritual life is inevitably going to be poverty-stricken in every way - it will be dwarfed, stunted, empty and nondescript. Babes in Christ when we should be men - is not this the charge that can so often be laid against us in the Christian Church? Christ wants us to get clear of the shallows; He demands all that there is of us, body, mind, heart, soul, and all else. When He has less than this, this much will be true of us: however genuine our interest in the work of the kingdom, our lives will never tell for God, and our witness will never be effective.