Tough No.10 Failure - Peter

Let's read about someone who discovered a hidden strength, or maybe it wasn't even latent within him, because he waited for the gift of God's Holy Spirit and he found as a result of God playing in the power of the Holy Ghost on his life, an ability to be able not to be 100% successful, but to be a jolly sight more successful than he was before that mighty experience. I refer to Peter, so let's take up the incidents in the lives of Peter as recorded in several passages in the New Testament. If you'd rather just listen and do so, but if you'd like to turn with them, I'll give you references.

Matthew 26 and the 31st verse, our Lord's anticipating his death, he's also expecting the default of his disciples. Verse 31, Matthew 26, Then Jesus told them this very night, you will all fall away on account of me. For it is written, I will strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.

But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee. Peter replied, Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will. I tell you the truth, Jesus answered, this very night before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.

But Peter declared, Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you. And all the other disciples said the same. Luke's Gospel chapter 22, you get the continuation, I believe, of that incident.

In the 34th verse, Jesus responds to Peter's protestations. In fact, we'll pick up the reading from verse 31, where our Lord predicts that Peter will let him down terribly. Luke 22, 31, Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail.

And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers. Back to Matthew 26 and the 57th verse. Gethsemane is now through.

Our Lord disturbed in his praying. He's now back in Jerusalem. Verse 57, Those who had arrested Jesus took him to Caiaphas, the high priest, where the teachers of the law and the elders had assembled.

But Peter followed him at a distance, right up to the courtyard of the high priest. He entered and sat down with the guards to see the outcome. The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for false evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death.

But they did not find any, though many false witnesses came forward. Finally two came forward and declared, This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days. Then the high priest stood up and said to Jesus, Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you? But Jesus remained silent.

The high priest said to him, I charge you under oath by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God. Yes, it is as you say, Jesus replied. But I say to all of you, in the future you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.

Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, He has spoken blasphemy. Why do we need any more witnesses? Look now, you have heard the blasphemy. What do you think? He is worthy of death, they answered.

Then they spit on his face and struck him with their fists. Others slapped him and said, Prophesy to us, who hit you? Now Peter was sitting out in the courtyard and a servant girl came to him. You also with Jesus of Galilee, she said.

But he denied it before them all. I don't know what you are talking about, he said. Then he went out to the gateway where another girl saw him and said to the people there, This fellow was with Jesus of Nazareth.

He denied it again and with an oath, I don't know the man. After a little while those standing there went up to Peter and said, Surely you are one of them, but your accent gives you away. Then he began to call down curses on himself.

He swore to them, I don't know the man. Immediately a rooster crowed. Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken before the rooster crows, You will disown me three times.

And Peter went outside and wept bitterly. Father, we come before your word. We thank you that not only is it a book in which doctrinal matters are revealed and closely reasoned, but a generous amount of narrative is contained, honestly depicting men and women.

Though of yesteryear, they seem to us to be on the page with the freshness of contemporaries. For we see in their struggles, our struggles. In their failures, our failures.

And in your divine intervention, hope for each one of us. So bless this word and may it have prophetic application to every individual within this sanctuary and all who shall ultimately hear it for the glory of the One who came on earth to seek and to save the lost. Amen.

I could not help but somewhat humorously think when presented with this particular subject in our series of a notice which allegedly went up outside an Anglican church, giving some indication as to the subject matter of the evening service the following week. What is hell like? And underneath was the invitation. Come and hear our vicar.

I use it as a humorous comment, but I write myself into the subject matter and the topic therefore that is ours to look at in this series of when the going gets tough, because we are thinking of failure and how to cope with failure. And whatever your own estimation of myself might be, I have found failure to be one of the things that I have grappled with all the years of my life. I guess it is pointless taking this particular run of addresses on a Sunday evening without in some way and on some occasion being a little autobiographical.

That helps you not just to identify with the narrative of the biblical text, but if not to sympathize, at least to empathize with the preacher, because one of the problems of you good folk is that often you put too high an evaluation on the men who handle Scripture. Our yardstick is the Bible. Our example is our Lord Jesus.

Our own lives, alas, are a poor reflection of what the Bible holds out as our honorable goals and as to what the Lord Jesus illustrates in terms of the perfect life. Some of you do not regularly come to the tab, and maybe you have misconceptions about these people who come to church regularly. Let me disabuse you of any notion that you may have that the church-going community in this town of Worthing are in the popular sense of the word a society of saints.

There is only one common denominator. I measure my words. There is only one common denominator that represents each one of us here, and that is the word failure.

To put it in a biblical setting, we have all sinned. We have all fallen short of the standards that God has set for us. And though sometimes evangelical Christians are ridiculed as needing the Bible and the Lord Jesus as their crutch, we are prepared to admit our own inadequacy and to say of our Lord God in the words of a lovely old hymn, I need thee every hour.

Thank God for the honesty of the Holy Spirit. Did you think that that was too much of a sentimental song that we sang earlier? Holy Spirit, we welcome you. It is the Spirit of God who helps to make real the presence of the Lord and plays in upon our minds, our mental processes, so that when we read Scripture, it can become to us a very personal word of God.

And the Holy Spirit is not only characterized in terms of His utter purity, but also His integrity. That means to say that when He causes men to write the history of the Old Testament era and the early church, they write it warts and all. They describe the successes and the failures, sometimes the abysmal failures of men and women whose goal has been at best to serve God.

We salute the integrity of the Spirit. Because were not this the case, then few of us here would have recourse to the Bible. If it were success story after success story, we would be so put off that our reaction would fall only just short of nausea.

But in the Word of God, we find recorded the experiences of men and women who have tried and often fail, who get up and have their wounds licked, who say in the authorized version of the words of one of the Old Testament prophets addressing the devil, "'Rejoice not, O mine enemy, for when I fall I shall arise, when I sit in darkness the Lord shall be a light unto me.'" No man had a better portfolio than Peter. He was well equipped for the ministry to which he had been called. There were stunning achievements as he spent those three precious years with our Lord.

With a greater perception than any of the other disciples, he was able to identify who Jesus was. Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. He was present on the Mount of Transfiguration.

He was there when our Lord did his most spectacular ministries. In the heart of the Garden of Gethsemane, he is a spectator on the scene. And if ever there was a man who seemed to have everything going for him, for whom failure could never become part of his vocabulary, at least of all to say part of his testimony, then Peter was that man.

And thank God, I say reverently, that within the failures of Peter, some of us can find consolation. And in the way that Jesus dealt with Peter, we can discover that encouragement, that stimuli that we need to be able to get up and shake the dust of us and have our wounds healed, with head held high again as those who have been forgiven, to put our hand to the plow and to live for the Lord Jesus. Egon René is well known in the United Kingdom as being the author of the Good Food Guide.

It's quite an achievement to get a mention there. There's some wag in the east end of London who outside a transport cafe has this particular placard, Egon René came here and wept. Do you think that sometimes our Lord Jesus weeps over the failure of people like Peter and ourselves? Certainly it's true that He is the friend of sinners, and therefore when we are battered and bruised and broken we can cry to Him because His ministry was to come to our aid.

We can, to quote the words of the epistle to the Hebrews, the author thereof, we can go to the throne of grace to find help in time of need. And Peter needed the help of Jesus. I needed the help of our Lord this morning.

The butterflies in my tummy, for reasons I still do not know, was evident to me nineteen years after entering this pulpit as they were at the beginning. A man only stands to proclaim the gospel. A man and a woman only stands to reproduce something of the characteristics of our Lord Jesus as a result of His grace.

We all know what it is to have the experience of the Apostle Paul when in the seventh chapter of Romans he says that the good he would like to do seems unachievable, and the evil that actually is detestable is that which he is constantly putting his hand to. We know what it is to beat upon our breasts and say, O wretched man that I am. We know what it is to do a pita, to stand before the fires of the high priests as the brazier burns, the Palestinian night, and as we have heard those putting their finger at us and identifying us with the Christ.

And we have in retaliation said, No, you have got it all wrong. Or maybe the scenery of your failure was not approximating completely to that, but at least it was there in principle. You let the Lord down.

Here is the most astonishing verses of Scripture that you have recorded in Matthew's gospel. When Peter at the butt of some servant girl denies the Lord Jesus and others come and reproduce the same allegation and he denies with even stronger language and then more come and they point the finger at him and suggest that he is the one who has been responsible for the chopping off of the ear of Malchus. And if that charge is sustained, Peter is in dire trouble.

And so with oaths and curses, resembling the day when he used to be a crude fisherman in Galilee, knowing the foul language that sometimes obtains amongst men when they're working closely together, he uses those self-same oaths in order to dissuade people who believe that he is an accomplice of Jesus that this is not the case. And inside the high priest's palace there is a man also under oath, Jesus himself. I adjure you, says Caiaphas, with that solemn questioning that demanded any orthodox Jew to respond, I adjure you under oath to say who you are.

Are you the Son of the living God? And under oath Jesus affirms what his oath-taking disciple rejects. What a tragedy that is. He who in a more glorious moment has said you are the Christ now denies it when the Christ is inside the palace affirming it.

You see the point? You tell me you're a failure this evening and God therefore can have nothing to do with you. I tell you not to our glory that there are people in my congregation who represent the abysmal failures that may be haunting you. We've known broken marriages.

We've known people who have proclaimed their faith in the Lord Jesus, been baptized, been received into the membership of the church and yet have let him down terribly. There is not one person here that I could charge amongst our committed Tav family who would stand up and say this preacher is exaggerating. We are all less than we ought to be.

But many of us thank God that we're not what we were and when the mad hour comes and we let him down and when the language of yesteryear that we thought we'd buried by the seashore of Galilee becomes our own language and when the flash of temper that we were party to years ago suddenly dominates us afresh, then all we can do is to come back to this Christ and say, Lord deal with me as you dealt with Peter. There were two things that were basic to the experience of Peter that kept him going in the madness of those hours. One I've touched on by smuggling in a little reading from the third gospel.

It was the fact that Jesus had anticipated Peter's failure. He didn't glory in the fact that the man would let him down, but he had pastoral need to inform Peter that he would not be surprised. And the most important thing that probably lodged in the subconscious of the fisherman was this, Peter, when what I predict happens, although you feel I've got it wrong, remember this, I have prayed for you.

There is one thing you can say about the Lord Jesus Christ, all his prayers are answered. He speaks to the Father in the authority of the title that is His, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And there is not one thing that our Saviour decrees, that our Saviour wishes, that will get a refusal from the Father.

Peter, I have prayed for you. I have prayed for you. Satan desires to have you as though you were salt in a sieve, to shake you up and down, to knock your spiritual equilibrium so that you feel as though you're toppling downwards and downwards and downwards.

But Peter, when that happens, for God's sake man, remember this, I have prayed for you. The second thing basic to Peter's failure, not basic in the sense of a cause of, but part of the attendant ministry of our Lord Jesus, was at the moment when he was denying Him, somehow and to understand it properly you'd have to study the architecture of the high priest's palace. Peter caught a glimpse of our Lord Jesus.

Maybe he was being taken from one floor to another floor. There was nothing that our Lord could do in terms of words or in terms of touch to meet the needs of Peter. A word would have made matters worse.

A touch would have identified him. The only thing that our Lord could conceivably have done was to cast a look in Peter's direction. I've said before from this pulpit, if there were two shots from a camera that I could have used in biblical times, one would have been to have taken the expression on the faces of Joseph's brothers when he said, I am Joseph.

And the second would have been to have taken the face of our Lord Jesus when he looked on Peter. Because that would have given the proof that I cannot now bring directly from Scripture, but by spiritual intuition if I have any I share with you. And that is that the look that our Lord had directed to Peter was not one of annoyance, was not one of disgust.

It was one that indicated, Peter, why are you wounding yourself in such a fashion as this? Why is it, Peter, that you are responding so weakly and so negatively to these questions that are being put your way? I know you, Peter. I know the love that you have for me. I know that in the depths of your being you are committed to me, but there is a weakness along with the strength in your nature.

There's sand as well as there is rock. And Peter, my look towards you is of wounded love, a reaffirmation that you're not forgotten. Peter rushes out into the darkness and he weeps.

Oh ye tears, oh ye tears, I am thankful that ye run. Though ye trickle in the darkness, ye shall glitter in the sun. The rainbow cannot shine if the rain refused to fall.

And the eyes that cannot weep are the saddest eye of all. Peter weeps as you yourself in your better moments might weep when you have let the Lord Jesus down. As there have been many times down on that seashore when I've wept before the Father because the charge that He gave me has not been held as tightly as it should.

The goals that I set have only feebly, if at all, been realized. There is a language in tears. These tears of Peter are not tears of remorse, for remorse is a thing that has no hope in it.

They're tears of repentance. The one thing that will keep Peter going through the nightmare of those hours is the recall of the words of Jesus. I prayed for you.

Your courage may have failed. Your hope may have failed. But Peter, I prayed for you that your faith will not fail.

Remember the look. When I was a kid, I was brought up to learn two prayers. One we still say at the tab or sing, Our Father who art in heaven.

The other was gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Look upon a little child. The look that our Savior turns on Peter.

He turns on the likes of you, and you, and you, all who recognize that you're less than you ought to be. All of you who sometimes turn in almost on a self-hatred of yourself. He turns the look, not a look of rebuke, but a look that inquires as to why you are wounding yourself so much.

And then, and then because our Lord Jesus has come to seek and to save the likes of us, He takes His remedial action. You see, our Savior, don't misunderstand this, is not only in the business of saving sinners. Thank God, part of His mandate is preserving us who are sinners, who have been saved, so that the day may come at the end of life when we will enter into the kingdom of our God and have an abundance access into His immediate presence.

So what does our Savior do when confronted with our failure? The first thing is He assures us that we are locked in His memory. He can go through the butchery of being beaten by the Romans, pinned to a cross. He can know the darkness of hell descend upon Him.

And when He's through on the resurrection side, and He speaks a message of hope to two tearful women, He says, go tell my disciples and Peter that I've been raised from the dead. Can a mother forget the child at her breast? Incredible the thought, but the answer is yes, it is possible. Can a husband abandon his wife? Can those in a small family reject one another? The answer lamentably is yes.

But there is one thing on God's universe which you are to know this evening, and it is this, that God does not suffer from amnesia. My name on the palm of His hands, eternity will not remove, says one of the Puritan writers of hymns. He cannot forget us for whom He died.

Tell my disciples and Peter, tell the fisherman that He's still there in my recall, and tell him I'm going to speak to him. And after the private interview, tell him to go back to Galilee. Why? Because when you've failed, I'll tell you what God will always do.

When you come to Him in contrition, He'll take you back to the place of beginnings, where it all started. And that's what you discover in the tender handling of Jesus as He looks upon His demented disciple. There on the seashore of Galilee, three years ago, turn the clock back, that's where it began.

Men were out fishing and they caught nothing, and Jesus came along and said, fellows, cast your net over on the other side. And as you discover our Lord Jesus in the last chapter of John's gospel, Peter and the disciples are there fishing. All night, they've caught nothing, and a voice speaks into the early light of the morning, cast your nets on the other side.

It brought it all back, of course it did, the scenario was the same. Then Jesus had appointed them to be fishers of men. Now He's going to invite them to have a breakfast with Him.

Jesus who has always had Peter in His recall, Jesus who has prayed for Peter, Jesus who has sent a telegram for Peter, now goes ahead of Peter into Galilee, and He reminds him, for Peter is a perceptive man, of how it all began. And sometimes, perhaps not geographically, but spiritually, God has to take you back. The years melt away.

Do you remember the day when you first became a Christian, and how blessed it was, and how your heart rejoiced? And as perhaps you have sung in later years, where is the blessedness I knew when first I sought the Lord? The Lord says, it's here. It's here again. I'll meet with you as you meet with me.

You see, this is our God, the Servant King. He doesn't hold a grudge. He's not come to dole out with the same currency as you sometimes pay Him.

It's always a language of love and forgiveness. He doesn't turn a blind eye to your sin. He'll always expose it, for if He doesn't, then He's a poor physician.

But having exposed it, He'll deal with it, He'll heal it, and He'll take you back to the beginnings and say, all right, do you love me? And you'll struggle with the Word, because you know He's testing you at the level of your discipleship. And you'll back off from the intimate commitment that He wants of one of the words of discipleship, and you'll offer it to Him on a lesser level. And He'll go down to that level, and He'll say, do you really love me? And then He'll put it to you again, and it seems as though He's treading on a nerve, but the reason why He's hurting is because He wants to heal.

He wants you to be shaken from your sense of self-dependence, so that you're entirely and completely dependent upon Him, for He is able to make you stand, no one else, and certainly not yourself. This is what Peter realizes, you see. And later on, when he writes the epistles as an old man, he goes back to that very classical Greek word, and he says of the Lord, yes, now I have the love that you tested me with in the first part of the conversation, when you put the triple questions to me.

Not only does Peter have the opportunity of starting again, the Lord commits him to a ministry. Feed my lambs. And it's a diminutive word that seems to suggest that Peter is going to minister at a sort of ABC level to the early church and to the Jews in Jerusalem, as indeed he does.

He gives them an indication of the resurrection of Jesus. And then Jesus steps up the word and He says, feed my sheep, and it's a sort of stronger commitment. Not just in terms of giving them the ABC, but Peter, you are to become a leader of the church.

And then again He says, Peter, feed my lambs. And He's once more back to the idea of Peter as the feeding a more mature church. And later on in life Peter will take out his pen and write down a doctrinal epistle of all that he knows of the Lord Jesus.

But he was a failure. He probably failed more than anybody here has ever failed in terms of those obnoxious olds. That's why we went for Peter as an illustration.

And as a secondary illustration, this is why I'm preaching it. Because in a sense I am Peter. Wang Mingdao told me, the pastor of Peking Tabernacle, when the day came in a moment of panic and madness and he denied Jesus, he then went down the main street of Peking and he wore a placard with a bit of string around his neck saying, I am Peter.

One of the greatest men in China recognized himself as an abysmal failure. But Jesus came for failures. So what's the area of your problem? Your marriage? Your teenage years? Your difficulty with some forms of temptation? A low self-esteem? Maybe you're one of the so-called greats in the tab.

You've been with us for years. But if the curtain was taken back and people saw your life, you would blush with shame. Then let me speak into that condition and say this, I have a Savior who can redeem all those years of hypocrisy.

Who can heal you. Who is able to make you stand. For the gospel that I proclaim is a gospel that is tailor-made for failures.

I'm glad I know Jesus and that He can do what He claims. Fulton Sheen is a Catholic bishop in America. One of the Catholics best preachers.

On one occasion he got out of a train coming to a city that he never visited before in the United States. He was due to preach in the town hall. He didn't know the way.

So he asked a couple of fellows, a couple of lads to show him. They told him where to go. And he said, I'm going to preach in the town hall.

Will you come and listen? And they said, Mister, what are you going to preach on? So he said, the way to heaven. So they said, no. He said, why not? They said with their youthful rudeness, if you don't know the way to the town hall, you're hardly likely to know the way to heaven.

Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, the way to heaven, and the man who deals with failures. Let's pray. Just a moment of quietness.

I know that I've touched some people on nerves this evening, but then I've touched a few of my own. And I want to pray that those of us who feel in some respects like Peter, I want to pray that our self-esteem might be restored, and our dignity might be repaired, and that we might have healing in our lives, and some might know salvation who've never discovered it before. The Holy Spirit can repair.

The Holy Spirit can bring by, not literally those years, but He can make the years that are yet to come so profitable, that in effect there is a restoration of all the wasted opportunities. He's able to make you stand. I don't know where your tragedy is.

It could be in your family, in your thought life, in your business, your personal disciplines or lack of. But wherever it is, I just want to pray that God right now, by the power of His Spirit, will come down and strengthen each person here. Let's all stand, shall we? Follow my prayer and say a hearty amen if you identify yourself with it.

Father, we come before you as a group of people. Many of us have tried to fight in some of the battles we've won by your grace. We don't honor you by being falsely humble.

We want to glory in what you have achieved in our lives. But Lord, for every victory there have also been failures, and for some of us the failure count has been higher than the success rate. We're asking for a reverse of the odds.

We're praying, Lord, that the ministrations that we've seen our Lord Jesus engaging towards Peter may be felt in our lives right now. Lord, may the power of your Spirit strengthen our thought life. May the power of your Spirit strengthen and keep honorable and pure every relationship that we have.

May the power of Spirit apply the blood of Jesus to the sin account of all who have unconfessed iniquity in their hearts. May the power of your Spirit fall upon each one of us and authenticate more clearly our claims to be Christian.