Peter’s Collapse (Part B)

Maybe it will get the wrong result. Maybe someone will cast me in a light that I don't care to be cast in or something like that. I can say when I was in the world, I don't recall ever being ashamed of Christ.

I don't recall ever not wanting to tell people about Him or denying that I was a Christian and nor have I as a pastor. But I do understand this, that you can experience something that is so perplexing, you become afraid. You don't have to be a coward to fail Jesus. The flesh can do it without cowardice. Anyone, if Christ had walked out and someone had smacked the Lord in the face in front of Peter, do you think he would have gone beast mode?

I don't have any doubt. It would have been an over my dead body moment. Unfortunately for Peter, this should have been an over my dead body moment too. A refusal to deny the Lord.

It was his opportunity and he doesn't take it. He would not have just sat there and watched his enemies abuse the Lord. But the flesh is making a fool of him and the result of fighting spiritual war in the natural is a natural disaster.

The lesson that we are getting, the emphasis Christ is making. How many of you this week have failed to fight spiritually some natural event? How many of you say, well I fight spiritually, I pray and I still get defeated? Yes, but you're fighting spiritually. You will not deny the Lord in that strength, in that fight. Peter, he is collapsing under the weight of pride and profound confusion. Again, a confusion that is difficult for us to relate to. Having not walked with Jesus personally for three and a half years, then see him arrested and carted away.

How would I get my head around that? Later, Peter would write in the spirit, be clothed with humility, 1 Peter 5. He's writing to Christians who are persecuted as he is feeling right now. He says, be clothed with humility for God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. Now he's quoting scripture but he's also lived that scripture out. It's not just a Bible quote.

He's saying, I once was not humble and I paid for it and yet here I am. And I am here to teach and to suffer, not just to teach. I believe that pastors should teach the word because I believe the Bible teaches that. I believe the pastors are supposed to be in harm's way because the Bible teaches that. I believe savage wolves will come into the flock, not sparing it if there is no shepherd in the spirit. And I believe that in doing that, the pastor is going to take bites and scratches.

He's going to get them in the back and on the leg and wherever else the wolves can get him. And I also believe that Christians should have the same kind of courage and same kind of zeal for the interest of the Lord with love but also with this understanding that this is what it calls for to defeat the work of Satan. In verse 72, a second time the rooster crowed, then Peter called to mind the word that Jesus had said to him, Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times. And when he thought about it, he wept. Now I've got to go back and read that whole verse again to you. What happened is mentally I looked and I said, I'm only 28 minutes into this.

Usually by 28 minutes, I'm at 45 minutes. Verse 72, I want to reread it now. A second time the rooster crowed, then Peter called to mind the word that Jesus had said to him, Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times.

And when he thought about it, he wept. Well on just a day-to-day thing for me, if I fall behind in my devotions, you know, I have a place in my mind how much I want to get read in my personal devotions, not my study time, not my sermon time, but in my just personal time. And sometimes I lag behind because it's the Lord's fault, of course. But anyway, then I'll catch up after a sermon and say, that was the verse I was looking for.

Well that's what I wanted to say, or that's what I should have quoted. And there's a little frustration there, and it's just a recall of the scripture. And for Peter, on a certainly more intense level, that's what's happening here. He's now recalling the rooster moment. Why didn't he remember when he got to the courtyard that this was how it was going to be? And maybe he could have, well he couldn't have because once the Lord said it was going to happen, it was going to happen. But we, the lessons we draw from that is, well if it were me, and if it wasn't carved in stone, then I would have avoided it by staying close to what God had spoken. Back to Peter here in verse 72, he is brave enough to hear the rooster crow. Because if he was hiding under a rock somewhere, he wouldn't have been there to hear the rooster crow. So it's important to me, because I wrestled with this all weekend long, is this kind of, you know, this dynamic between him being a coward and being afraid.

And they're not the same thing. How, you know, what do I learn from this? Because I come across times in my life when I'm afraid for Christ. I don't want to say something that maybe somebody, maybe it will get the wrong result, maybe someone will cast me in a light that I don't care to be cast in, or something like that. I can say when I was in the world, I don't recall ever being ashamed of Christ.

I don't recall ever not wanting to tell people about him or denying that I was a Christian, nor have I as a pastor. But I do understand this, that you can experience something that is so perplexing, you become afraid. And I'll give you a personal example, since I've got so much time left.

Thank you very much. So, as some of you know, my background was in steel construction, heavy steel. And I was working on a particular job in Long Island, New York. It was a place where they were building a plant to burn trash. So the trucks would dump trash in this enormous pit and these overhead cranes would pick up the trash and dump it into the furnace and it would burn it all up. And then they would recover the ash and recycle it into ash. Get yourself a gallon of ash. Anyway, so this, why I'm saying that is because, you know, a simple high rise or a bridge, they're kind of straightforward.

But these plants, they're weird, because they house all this goofy equipment, overhead cranes and all this stuff. And it's just hard to work on these things if you're climbing around steel like a monkey. So, I still got some of that. Anyway, it had snowed a few days before. And that meant we couldn't work. So when it snows, you stay home and then the temperatures rise above freezing and the snow melts a little bit and then it freezes again in ice. Now you've got ice on the steel. And you go to work the next morning, which we did.

Listen, it's icy up there. What do you guys want to do? We said, well, it doesn't look too bad. Well, we'll go to work.

And so we went to work. Well, while we're 65 feet in the air, my partner and I, and the crane is giving us the pieces of steel and we're putting them in place, and I could see him out the corner of my eye giving a signal to the crane, which he really wasn't supposed to do. But I didn't rub it in his face because he almost got killed. But I would like to rub it in his face and say, I was right, you were wrong.

I don't mind sharing you how my flesh thinks because I know yours does the same thing. But anyway, I look over to the crane operator and then out the corner of my eye, I see him falling and tumbling like a rag doll. And he hits the ground. He does survive this. He loses his spleen because he was careless. It's a joke.

How did you lose your spleen? I was careless. I couldn't remember where I put it. Anyway, so yeah.

I know some of you, what time you got here? You're not awake yet. So anyway, Mark was this. Mark falls, hits the ground. I'm praying for him all the way down. But I'm still stuck up on the steel. And there's nothing under me but him, the ground, 65 feet. I'm saying to myself, how did this happen?

What did he do? How could he, I mean, he felt there was a narrow crevice too, pieces of steel. So what I'm telling you is I was confused. Did he step on a beam and a piece of ice caused him to slip? What happened in that few seconds that I lost eye contact with him? So it took me forever to get down because there was this fear of, I don't want whatever happened to him to happen to me. I started to slide down the column, which was typical. But I'm thinking, if that thing's got ice on it, it's going to happen to me too. So my point is, I don't know, I'm back 20 years now working on buildings.

I got it. My point is, fear. When you don't know what's going on, it can make you afraid. It doesn't make you a coward, but it does unravel you.

It does take the nerve out. It makes you try to think the way, just goofy way. So when I got to the bottom one and the guy said, what took you so long? I was like, oh man, it's the servant girl.

You were one of them. I mean, what do you mean what took me so long? Because he knew I should have just slid down the column, the 65 foot worth of columns.

But again, I'm thinking, man, those things are iced up. I'm not going that way. I should have gone that way.

I've thought about it often. So when I come to this section of scripture, I can identify with Peter being, I don't know what to do. He's been unraveled, and this was a true disciple who failed at a critical moment, which makes it so important for me. Again, no pass. Matthew chapter 10, Jesus said, whoever denies me before men, him I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.

So what do we do with something like this? Well, clearly, that's not the unpardonable sin mixed into it. To go to your death denying Christ is unpardonable. That is the rejection of the Holy Spirit whose work is to testify of Christ and the salvation that he brings and who he is. This was a dismal failure for Peter, and had he died in this state, it would have been a giant question mark over his head.

And Christ wants us to know these things. A dismal failure with an amazing recovery. It was not unpardonable because he repented. And his tears were the beginning of that repentance. This was made right.

This failure was not so far outside of our failures. Maybe you've been somewhere and you just, you know, you knew you were supposed to speak up for Christ and you did not. Were you denying the Lord?

Yeah, then it gets a little sticky, does it not? Well, then Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said to him. There's the complete collapse at that moment. It says, before the rooster crows twice you will deny me three times. The second crow of the rooster alone was not enough to dismantle him. That was not enough. There was something else that went with the fulfilled word of Christ.

What was that? It was the face of Christ. Luke tells us that. Luke chapter 22 verse 60. But Peter said, Man, I do not know what you are saying. Immediately, while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed and the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, before the rooster crows you will deny me three times. There'd be no point in putting that in there that Jesus looked at Peter unless Peter looked at Jesus. At the same time, there had to have been that eye to eye contact.

Simon was not looking away. It may have been too painful for Peter to even repeat. Mark chapter 14 verse 30. Jesus said to him, Assuredly I say to you that today, even this night, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times. But he spoke more vehemently. If I have to die with you, I will not deny you.

And they all said likewise. And now all of this is crashing down on him. His bold speech and failure to carry it out. His overestimation of himself to fight in the Spirit. The look of Christ, what about that?

What was that? Well, I don't think at all it was an I told you, Peter. We know our Lord did not, a bruised reed, he will not break. A smoking flax he will not quench. He's not petty.

It's not, how could you? How could you fail me? Well, he knew. Christ knew he was going to fail him.

And he knew how he could and he knew all about it. And it certainly was not Peter, you coward. One pastor of old says, the look may have been more like this. Why are you wounding yourself, Peter?

That's closer to the character of Christ that I know. You know, woman, where are your accusers? You know, when they came, we caught her.

We caught her in the act. They were bloodthirsty in Christ, sort of writing in the sand. We don't know what he was writing. I get the, my thinking is, he was just ignoring them. Because he knew they were full of baloney.

And that's being polite. I, you know, we read that and the Lord says, after he exposes them for their hypocrisy and injustice, he says to the woman, where are your accusers? And she says, Lord, they're gone.

I have none. And he says, neither do I accuse you. Go and sin no more. So why would I think that Christ is, that look that he has is anything but love and promise. Peter probably would have been carnally better off if Christ had been angry with him. But it was that look of love. And so we read, and when he thought about it, we cannot dismiss the significance of that.

It is large. How many Christians, how many times we don't think about things? You know, I don't want to be so into scripture that I have no joy in the song. And I don't want to be such a songbird Christian that's all I've got. If the music's not right, I don't want to be that Christian either.

I want the balance, the blend. And I'll live without one or the other if the Spirit is with me. This, when he thought about it in the Greek, is closely translated, says one Greek scholar this way, when he threw his thought upon it, feelings were made servant to the word of Christ at this point in Peter's life. All of his feelings had to line up behind what Christ said. And the face of Christ, the countenance. The Lord bless you, the Lord keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you, lift up his countenance on you. And that's that countenance that Peter saw and hating himself for the thing he was not able to be.

Oh, we've been there to see what we're not able to be. Yeah, I think I got some mail this morning from a megachurch somewhere, and megachurches always make me feel like I'm failing. Why do they get all the money? Why do they get to be able to do this and that?

What am I doing wrong? And they could be dressed up in hockey suits or something on Sunday mornings, doing everything wrong. Not that hockey's bad.

You don't want a church or people coming in with hockey masks and stuff. But it doesn't matter. We have to face in life who we are.

But I have to add this. It's taken me years to understand what I am built for as a Christian and what I'm supposed to be doing. And once I got there, it's so liberating. It's so nice to know this is what I'm supposed to be.

When I was an usher in New York, I knew that this is what I was supposed to be doing, and I loved it. And I love this too. Well, sometimes I don't love it as much. But usually there's someone else to blame.

It's better for me that way. Anyway, he wept. Matthew adds, wept bitterly.

The Greek, so when the Lord wept at the graveside of Lazarus, we read Jesus wept. That's a different Greek word for wept there. There it means in the Greek that he shed tears. Here, as when he looked at Jerusalem and wept over Jerusalem, it means to burst out in tears, bawling, wailing, heavy crying.

You know the one where you just don't have enough tissues. And this is what was happening for Peter. He burst into tears.

The angel will single out Peter, the extraterrestrial messenger of God, will send by the women, and Mark 16, we'll get to it sometime in the future, but go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you into Galilee and there you will see him as he said to you. Singling him out, singling him out. What you did Peter was not unpardonable.

We can fix this. It was unpardonable for Judas because Judas never came back. In 2 Samuel, when the woman of Tekoa came to King David with this elaborate story that Joab had made up, to try to get David's banished son out of Moab where he was in exile and back to Jerusalem, she says in her story, for we will surely die and become like water spilled on the ground which cannot be gathered up. Yet, God does not take away a life, but he devises means so that his banished ones are not expelled from him.

Well, that's Peter's story there. None of us live for Christ naturally. If you think you can live for Christ naturally, you don't get it. You don't understand what it means to be born.

We use the word born again, but the Greek is also born from above. There's a spiritual feature to our salvation that is absent from every other salvation. You know, the books like the Koran, for example, there's no prophecy in there.

There's certainly no proofs of what is written there, whereas you come to the scripture and there's prophecy all over the place, much of it already fulfilled and much of it still to be fulfilled and in our own day. If you are a valid Christian, it is because you know how to hurt. You have struggled. You have suffered in Jesus' name and you are, you've learned to pray.

You've learned to fill time with prayer. Jesus, as I mentioned, intending to rebuild this collapse, this servant. Luke's Gospel, Luke records, when Peter was warned, the Lord said, Simon, Simon, indeed Satan has asked for you that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you that your faith should not fail and when you have returned to me, strengthen your brethren, and all that happened. His faith failed, it faltered.

Judas, by contrast, his faith failed. Christ knew that Peter would recover and was a part of it and thus we read in the New Testament letters, Paul talking about Christ at the right hand of God, interceding for us, and there he is interceding for Peter. You're never suffering alone, you Christians. You are never alone in your suffering. You may think no one understands, no one knows, and there may be some truth to that.

I can't speak for everyone, but most of the time, someone else is likely praying for you too because that's how big the Holy Spirit is. Anyway, in Acts and in 1 Peter and throughout church history, those impacted by the life of Peter, we will see that it is a victory in Christ. Peter fails again at Antioch when James sends up a hit squad up to Antioch. James, the brother of the Lord, the writer of the Epistle to James, he was a problem for Paul.

And it's very clear in Galatians chapter 2 that they came from James to spy out our liberty and then Paul laments, even Barnabas was taken by them. Even Barnabas, it hurt Paul. And my point is, it was Peter at the same time. Peter is going to fail again, but then he'll recover from that too. We don't see Paul failing too much.

He just was a dynamo. So if you are afraid of intellectuals, very smart people, you better thank God for a man like Paul. The Bible is filled with very smart men. Isaiah, you read the prophecies. This guy knew places and geography and language.

He was just a sharp cookie. And then we have the fishermen. We have the Apostle John, just a fisherman that wrote like a poet. Anyway, the cleansing tears of Peter. He dies in the end, of course, as Jesus told him he would. Peter, when you're old, they're going to take you to where you don't want to go. And he was talking about his crucifixion, his lion-like courage that is forged by faith. So I'm closing now. Like all of us, Peter was strong when he could not see the temptation coming.

And he was weak when it appeared. Thanks for tuning in to Cross-Reference Radio for this study in the book of Mark. Cross-Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. To learn more information about this ministry, visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. Once you're there, you'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross-Reference Radio. You can search for Cross-Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. That's all we have time for today, but we hope you'll join us next time as Pastor Rick continues to teach through the book of Mark, right here on Cross-Reference Radio.