There was a woman living down by the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea a good while ago.  Her heart had been touched by God, and ever after beat warm for others.  But what could she do?  She couldn’t make speeches, nor write papers for the missionary society, nor preside over its meetings.  She seemed to have one special gift.  She could sew.  She could do plain sewing and overcast, cross-stitch and hem-stitch.  I suppose she knew the herring-bone-stitch and feather-stitch, and other sorts too.

And so she just busied herself finding out poor folks who needed clothing, some women too hard-worked to care for their children’s clothing.  And she sewed for them.  She was a seamstress for Jesus’ sake to all the needy folks she could find.  I expect she stuck pretty closely to the plain stitching, though likely as not she would put in some of the fancy too to please the people she was winning to her Master.

And she sewed the story of Jesus, and the heart of Jesus, into coats and skirts and such.  All through Joppa her message went into homes not otherwise open perhaps.  And the women read the story of her heart in the stitches and they found Jesus through her needle.  She used what she had.  And the women of the church have rightly honored her name in their societies.

But mark keenly this:  while using to the full, and faithfully, just what you have, there must needs be utter dependence upon God.  Not what you have, nor what you can do, but Somebody in what you have, and through what you do.  Notice, “Their nets were breaking.”  They were to use their nets, but the power was somewhere else.  As we are made up, there frequently needs to be a breaking before the glory of God is revealed.  It need not be so, necessarily.

Yet as a matter of fact most people have to stub their toes and then go stumbling down with a clash, measuring their length on the earth, and getting some scars that stay before they can be mightily used.  So many strong wills are strong enough to be stubborn, but not strong enough to yield.  Gideon’s pitchers had to be broken before the lights flashed out and brought panic to the enemy.

It was when the alabaster box was broken that its fine fragrance filled the house, and spread out into all the world.  Somebody prayed, “O Lord, take me, and break me, and make me.”  That is the usual order as a matter of fact.  Yet if the strength of stubbornness that must be broken down to change its direction, were but swung God’s way at once—­But most folks that have been greatly used have some of this sort of scars.  Utter dependence upon God’s strength in doing God’s service is the lesson of the breaking nets.

Expectancy in Service.

The climax of this message of Jesus is in its end:  “Let down your nets for a draught.”  There is to be expectancy in service.  Ideas of draughts changed that day.  “Peter, what would you call a good draught?” “Well,” the old fisherman says, as he sits stitching up the holes in his nets, “after last night I think if we got a boat half full it wouldn’t be a bad haul.”  “Andrew, what’s a draught?” And Andrew says, “I think after this water haul we’ve had, a haul of holes, Peter hits it pretty close.”