Every leader is holding something they’d struggle to put down. Ask most of us to name it and we’d stall. We’d just feel the grip tighten.
That’s the danger of a net. Hold it long enough and you stop noticing it. It becomes part of your hands.
“And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men.’ And immediately they left their nets and followed Him.” (Mark 1:17–18, ESV)
Read that slowly. Sunday school turned it into a flannelgraph moment: four nice fishermen and a sunny shoreline. Mark tells it in a handful of verses with no soundtrack. Peter and Andrew drop their nets. A little farther down the beach, James and John leave their father Zebedee sitting in the boat with the hired men, and they walk.
Immediately. No committee. No five-year transition plan. No exit strategy.
Call it what it is: the blueprint of discipleship. Every time Jesus calls, something gets left on the sand.
What the Net Meant
For a first-century fisherman, the net was everything at once. His paycheck. His family name. His retirement plan. His father’s legacy and his son’s future. When Peter let go of that net, he let go of his whole answer to the question, “Who am I, and how am I going to make it?”
Your net looks different. It binds just as tight. The title on the door. The network that still returns your calls. The revenue stream. The board that likes you. The applause of peers and investors. The follower count.
We grip those things because they answer three questions we’re scared to leave open. Who am I? Am I safe? Do I matter?
Let me tell you about my net.
For twenty-four years, my identity came with a badge. I protected seven presidents. I stood a few feet from the most powerful people on earth, and nobody ever had to tell me who I was. The job told me every morning. Walk into a room wearing that pin and the room adjusts to you.
Then I retired. The pin came off, and I found out how much of me I’d stored in it. Laying that badge down was harder than any assignment I ever worked. Harder than the protective details. I write this as a man who has had his knuckles white on a net.
Here’s what the corporate playbook will never print: anything you lay at Christ’s feet because He is infinitely more worthy is never lost. It goes into the hands of the One who redeems it, reframes it, and returns it better than you could have dreamed. Sometimes He hands it back. Sometimes He hands you something you didn’t know to ask for. Either way, your hands end up open.
Open hands are the posture of a steward. A steward holds his master’s money carefully and loosely at the same time. It was never his. He knows the day of accounting is coming, and he’s ready to give an account for every coin. That’s how a surrendered leader holds influence.
Redeemed Work
Drop the net of self-promotion and performance-driven worth, and something breaks loose in you. You’re done fishing for affirmation in the shallow water of quarterly results.
Here’s the shift. Work becomes the stage where you live as someone already approved in Christ. Already. Before the deal closes. Before the review. Before the board votes. You get to walk into Monday carrying a verdict the market can’t overturn.
That frees you from the exhausting grind of building your own name. And it puts every ounce of your leadership capital to work making His name known. Keep tracking the margins. Watch the market share. Those numbers belong on the dashboard. Just get them off the throne.
Faithfulness to Christ becomes the measure, and the question that keeps you up at night gets simpler: How well did I represent the King while I was here?
Settle It Before Anyone Asks
In the 1990s, Strive Masiyiwa set out to launch a mobile network in Zimbabwe. The government stood between him and a license, and the easy road ran straight through a bribe. Everybody knew how the game was played.
Masiyiwa, a committed follower of Christ, had already settled the question. He would not pay.
So he dropped the net and took the long road through the courts. The fight dragged on for years and pushed him to the edge of financial ruin. When Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court finally cleared the way, Econet Wireless launched with its integrity intact. Masiyiwa went on to build one of Africa’s great companies and became one of the continent’s most respected voices for ethical leadership.
The bribe would have bought him a license. Obedience bought him trust, longevity, and a Kingdom credibility no envelope could ever buy. Now look at when he decided. Long before anyone slid an envelope across a table, he had dropped that net in private. Hear me on this.
Pressure is a terrible place to discover your convictions.
Wait until the envelope shows up, and you’ll negotiate. You’ll tell yourself this one is different. Everybody does. Settle it before God when no one is watching, and the meeting where the compromise shows up becomes a short one.
So what have you already decided? Which shortcuts, side deals, and quiet compromises are off the table before anyone puts them on it? If you can’t answer that today, you just found your homework.
Redeemed Relationships
Some of the tightest nets have faces.
Plenty of leaders cling to relationships that serve their ambition more than God’s mission. The mentor you keep around for his contacts. The friend you only call when you need an introduction. The partner whose ethics you overlook because the deal flow is good. Dropping that net may cost you the insider advantage. But it will buy you the freedom to lead with nothing hidden.
Surrender your relationships to Christ and the stepping stones turn back into people. Image-bearers. Men and women whose flourishing you’ve been called to protect. That changes how you manage your team, how you walk into conflict, and how you guard your own heart.
A surrendered leader draws hard boundaries, because a compromised life disqualifies a Gospel witness. They pour into younger leaders and invest in something that will outlast them both, whether or not it ever shows up on LinkedIn.
Over time, people follow you because your life keeps pointing past you to the King.
The Kingdom Economy
Every net you drop looks like a loss on the world’s balance sheet. In the Kingdom’s economy, it’s the opening God uses to fill your boat in ways you never imagined.
Jesus put it plainly: “There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for My sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30).
A hundredfold. Now. In this time. And tucked right into the middle of the promise, two words nobody prints on a coffee mug: “with persecutions.”
That’s the math of grace. The returns are real, and they come with a cross attached. Anyone selling you Jesus without the cross is selling you a counterfeit.
Run the numbers over a lifetime and on into eternity, and you’ll find what every faithful saint before you has found. You never run a deficit with Christ.
When the Nets Call You Back
Here’s the part of the story we like to skip.
After the cross. After the empty tomb. After Peter had seen the risen Lord with his own eyes. He went back to the boat.
“Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’ They said to him, ‘We will go with you.’ They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing” (John 21:3).
The net he dropped on day one found its way back into his hands. And watch who followed him. Six men climbed into that boat behind him. Leaders never drift alone.
It happens to leaders all the time. A public failure. A long season when obedience costs more than you budgeted. A stretch where following Jesus feels slower than the market. Suddenly the old net looks like home. At least you know how to work it.
All night. Nothing.
Now watch what Jesus does.
He’s standing on the shore at dawn. He tells them where to cast. The net comes up with 153 large fish, and something clicks for Peter, because he’s seen this before. Years earlier, on the day Jesus first called him, the nets came up so full they started to tear (Luke 5:6). Jesus is replaying the first call.
Then Peter hits the beach and sees a charcoal fire. The last time John mentions a charcoal fire, Peter was standing beside one in the high priest’s courtyard, warming his hands and denying he ever knew the Man (John 18:18). Same smell. Same smoke. Jesus walks Peter straight back to the scene of his worst failure and cooks him breakfast there.
That’s your Savior. He goes right to the scene of your collapse, builds a fire on it, and invites you to eat.
Then He asks the question every marketplace leader eventually has to answer: “Simon, son of John, do you love Me more than these?” (John 21:15).
More than these. Whatever else Jesus meant, the boat and the catch were lying right there on the sand. He put the nets back in front of Peter and asked him to choose again. Three denials. Three questions. One restored shepherd.
He’ll do the same with you, more than once. Grace keeps calling, even after you’ve picked the nets back up.
Your Turn to Drop the Nets
So let me ask you straight, as a brother who loves you. What net is in your hands right now?
A title propping up your sense of worth? A network you’re terrified to lose? A revenue stream you’ve quietly compromised to keep? A relationship you know is pulling you off mission?
Don’t answer too fast. The real one is usually the one you’d rather not name.
Then do three things this week.
Name it out loud to one brother or sister who will look you in the eye next month and ask how it’s going.
Decide now, in private, what you won’t do when the pressure comes. Write it down if you have to.
Then open your hand.
The call hasn’t changed in two thousand years: drop the nets. Lay the marriage, the career, the influence, and the crown before Christ, and watch Him redeem them into something more beautiful, more joyful, and more eternally weighty than anything you could have held onto.
A better job, a stronger network, even healthier relationships: those are secondary gifts. The greatest thing He gives you is Himself. And once you have Him, nothing you’ve laid down is lost.
