A Fish Out Of Water Series

My wife Chelsey and I went for dinner for my birthday last night, and the restaurant was super noisy. I was already feeling a bit sensitive on my birthday as many of us do, and it got stressful for me. Many of the people were drinking, and carrying on, having a good time, or so it seemed.

And I overheard some of the conversations. They were talking about worldly stuff, parties, drinking, there was some swearing going on, bragging about conquests, drunken stories, and hysterical laughter.

I’m not against anyone having a good time, but I remember when I used to be like that. Rudderless, I didn’t know what life was really about. I basically just lived to have fun and make a living. If I got drunk and crashed down a flight of stairs I laughed about it. If I stole something I bragged about it. If I chased a girl I told everyone about it.

I was a fish out of water, uncertain what to do, or how to live. Today I’d like to talk to you about fish. We human beings exist in a nitrogen, oxygen, argon environment. That is the environment which we thrive in. For fish it’s different, they thrive in an environment made up of water.

A fish can survive out of water, but not for very long. Similarly, a human can survive under water for a certain period, but eventually they’ll need oxygen again.

So we’re going to compare a fish to the life of a human being on planet Earth.

We all start out as the gray fish. The gray fish represents the sinful human being in the world.

Every human being lives life as a fish out of water. We see this fish and he’s not in water, he’s on land and that’s not good. He goes his own way, he doesn’t know where he’s going or why.

We are like this fish as humans without God. We are lost, we need God, but we don’t have God.

So we slowly become more and more spiritually sick. We get worse and worse over time.

We try to be a moral person. We try to act good and be good. But it never quite worked out.

We didn’t have the power needed to live in an ethical way. Instead the scriptures say that we bore fruit for death.

It says in Romans 7:5, “For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death.”

We knew the ten commandments, God’s law, and we tried at times to follow those laws, but being a fish out of water, being disconnected from God, we were unable to follow those commands.

Knowing the law, the commandments didn’t seem to help, in fact it even seemed to make it worse, it aroused our passions and we bore fruit for death.

And more and more we lived, but actually inside we were dead. But this produced an opportunity. Because as we found ourselves dead inside, lost in sin, utterly miserable and hopeless, we began to search for something more.

We began to long for something greater.

Then one day we heard about the gospel of Jesus Christ. We learned that humanity was sinful and lost, but that God had opened up a pathway, a road to himself and away from sin through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We learned that our sins could be forgiven not by trying to be better through the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

And something miraculous happened. We called out to Jesus Christ and asked Him to save us and forgive us, and make us new. And at that same moment, we died. Our old selves died. We repented, turned away from our past sins, and began moving in an entirely new direction.

“But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” -Romans 7:6

We find ourselves new creatures. We’ve repented. We’re no longer headed toward destruction, we’re now headed toward eternal life.

Instead of being in the open air, slowly dying, like a fish out of water, desperately trying to follow the ten commandments and always failing, we find ourselves in a new reality, a new system, the system of the leading of the Holy Spirit.

All of humanity finds itself caught up under God’s judgment due to the sinful ways of humanity, under the law, the ten commandments, and condemned to death due to their failure to obey God’s law.

It’s scary stuff.