Somebody on the Shore Before You Knew It

The gulls start before the light does. That is the thing nobody tells you about a dock. You are working in the dark and then the birds go off, and then a while later the sky does what it does over the water, gray to pewter to that thin gold along the bottom edge.

Ropes wet. Crates stacked. His hands know where everything is without asking him. Eleven hours and the last of them is always the longest, and he does the last of them the way he does all of them, which is well, and without being present for a minute of it.

There is a flask in the cab of his truck and a phone with two unread messages from his sister and a bed at home that his wife left an hour ago. The routine holds him up the way a chair holds a person up.

And walking up the jetty with the gold coming along the water, he thinks the thing he thinks maybe once two weeks, which is that if God were around here, some part of him would have picked it up by now.

That is a reasonable thought. It is the same instrument you would use for anything else: eleven hours on a dock and you know exactly when weather is coming because your body tells you. So he uses that instrument on God, gets nothing back, and files it accordingly.

Cousin, before you get to the truck, I want to take you to a beach at dawn where some men had been out all night, and I want you to notice how long Somebody was standing there before anyone in the boat looked up.

The fire was already lit

After the resurrection, seven of them go fishing. All night, and nothing. Anybody who has worked water knows exactly what that boat felt like at four in the morning.

But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore: but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus.John 21:4

Read the last clause slowly. The disciples knew not that it was Jesus.

He was standing there. Not on His way. Not about to arrive. Standing on the shore, present, in full view, and the men in the boat, who had lived with Him for three years and would have known His walk anywhere, did not pick it up.

Now hold your instrument up against that. You have concluded that because you have not detected anything, there is nothing to detect. And here is a recorded morning where the men closest to Him in the world had Him in plain sight and did not register Him. Their instrument was not reading, and He was there anyway.

You are not being measured by what you have been able to sense, and He has been standing where you have not been looking. That is not a hopeful spin on a long night; John 21:4 says plainly that they knew not that it was Jesus while He was standing on the shore, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a beach in Galilee and stands it up on a working dock at first light. Your detector has never been the evidence.

And there is a detail in that chapter that I want you to have, because it is the one that undoes a man.

When they finally get to shore, verse nine tells us what was there before they arrived. A fire of coals. Fish on it. Bread. Somebody had built a fire and started breakfast for a crew that had been out all night catching nothing and had no idea He was even there.

He was cooking for them before they knew He existed on that beach.

You have been provided for during hours you assumed were unattended, and the fire was lit before anybody looked up. John 21:9 records the coals and the fish and the bread already waiting, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an unremarkable line about a breakfast and makes it a fact about a man walking up a jetty with his hands wrecked from a night's work. Absence of feeling is not absence of provision. It never has been.

Why a night shift is exactly the hour He shows up

Let me say one more thing about the timing, because it is not incidental.

Every arrival in that chapter happens at the worst end of a working night. The men have been at it since dark, they are wet, they have nothing to show for it, and one of them has a much bigger thing eating at him that nobody has mentioned yet. That is when He turns up on the sand.

It is the pattern all the way through. He comes to a well at noon when nobody sensible is out. He walks on water in the fourth watch, which is the coldest and least hopeful hour there is. He arrives in a garden before it is properly light. The book is not full of appointments at convenient hours. It is full of arrivals at the end of long nights.

You are working in exactly the hour He has a habit of arriving in, and none of those arrivals in the book were announced beforehand. Mark 6:48 has Him coming to them in the fourth watch of the night, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a two thousand year old pattern a live thing on a jetty rather than a fact about somebody else's water. The hour you have been calling godless is His usual hour.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it matters more than your instincts.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. He named the smallest seed a man would ever plant. Not the sensitivity of a person after eleven hours. Not how much you can feel walking up a jetty. That a man opens his mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.