Now what Peter is saying here in this opening phrase is so important, especially when his readers are going to encounter persecution for claiming this creed, for holding to this confession of faith that Jesus is none other than the divinely appointed God the Son, the Messiah.
So he opens with that. It's as if he says, look, stay with it. This is the gospel of grace. Don't veer off. You're not following the wrong man.
You didn't get it wrong. He really is the Christ. This is a series called Profiling Christians. It comes from the opening verses of an epistle that Peter wrote called 1 Peter. He was writing to Christians who felt marginalized in the Roman Empire and who needed encouragement from God. Peter's goal for them and for us was to remind them of God's unfailing grace. As we get started in this series, Stephen will help us get to know the author, Peter.
So today's message is part one of a sermon called Introducing an Old Fisherman. The year is A.D. 64. Arsonists have set fire to the imperial city of Rome. By the time the fire is brought under control, three of the 14 districts into which the capital city is divided will have been burned to the ground. It isn't a coincidence that the property most affected, in fact where the fire began, began was that same plot of ground where the emperor Nero wanted to build his new imperial palace.
And there wasn't room. Historians have long since believed that he was, in fact, the arsonist. But to avoid suspicion, his propaganda machine began spreading the news that Christians ignited the flame. Those, you know, strange people who never really quite fit in. Who have these strange gatherings where they worship a dead carpenter. Those somewhat unpatriotic people who will not pledge allegiance to Caesar. You know, those people who won't allow even the possibility of the existence of some other god or goddess in our great pantheon.
Those people, it figures. Now persecution against Christianity up to this point has been local. It's been somewhat random, unorganized. But now it begins to coalesce. Christianity is facing a new crisis. Their world is changing and they are, frankly, no longer welcome. About this time, an old fisherman turned church statesman reaches for his quill and, under the inspiring influence of the Holy Spirit, begins to write.
Now he knew that Christians, not only in his generation but by the Spirit of God in every generation, would be asking these kinds of questions that maybe we're asking more today than ever. How do you respond when people think you're strange for worshipping not only differently but dogmatically, as if you belong to the only true and living God? How do you react when government officials penalize you for your beliefs? How do you work for employers who demand that you make concessions or else? How do you move on after a spouse rejects you because you will not reject Jesus Christ?
What do you do when you realize that while your life might not be immediately threatened, your career is? The letters of the Apostle Peter could have been written to us today. Beloved, they have been. They have been.
And are they ever needed? Perhaps only in recent months the average Christian has begun to read the newspaper and follow the news reports, watch the decisions of legislators and courts with a growing sense, a growing recognition that suffering something for the sake of following Christ isn't just new. It's going to be normal. Being mocked and maligned and misunderstood and marginalized is simply new to the American Christian. But our world has changed and things are coalescing. We've now entered an era in our history where to be comfortable and culturally acceptable, and at the same time a committed Christian is impossible. Unless you keep quiet, but then that's not much of a commitment. One author put it this way, the days of casual Christianity is over.
And I'm really excited about that. He wrote, it's no longer possible to drift hoping that no tough choices will have to be made. It will not cost something to be a follower of Jesus Christ. And he goes on to write very perceptively, never before in American history has it been so important for the Christian to be connected to a believing body of believers, participating with other believers in worship, encouragement, instruction, prayer, discipleship, gospel outreach, because, he summarizes, the darker the night, the more important every single candle becomes.
You become all the more significant as the lights go out. Perhaps only in recent months, the average Christian and the average believing church in America is finding more sympathy and more respect and more interest, more concern for believers in other places around our world like in China or Indonesia or Turkey or Sudan or Japan or Russia, with new laws enacted just weeks ago. And the basic question asked by the majority of believers around the world, we're just beginning to ask, is how do we live when our world changes? How do we respond?
In fact, let me put it this way. What is our disposition supposed to be? What is our demeanor supposed to be like? What is our reputation to be? I think the answer is by our brothers and sisters around the world. In fact, one mission agency that monitors the church and the People's Republic of China asked several thousand believers what drew them to faith in Christ, especially when it could mean demotion, persecution, even imprisonment. And many answers were provided, but the one answer that was given most often that drew them to the gospel was the joy, get that, the joy in the lives of believers with whom they came into contact, such joy that made them envious, then curious, and then receptive. As we study the letters of Peter and we read the newspaper one in one hand and one in the other, although they're not certainly equal in inspiration, if we end up panicking or resentful or angry, we're not heading in the right direction. Peter will write in his first letter in the face of testing, keep on rejoicing, chapter four. He's going to write in this letter that when they revile you because of your association with the name of Jesus Christ, I want you to be happy, Micaiah. I want you to have a settled sense of internal joy and satisfaction. He will write, in fact, if you open his letter at 1 Peter and go over to chapter five, chapter five and verse 12, he says, I have written to you briefly, middle part of the verse.
Here's why. Exhorting, testifying that this is the true grace of God, stand firm in it. In other words, you are people redeemed by the grace of God. It is the gospel of grace from God. Stand in grace in the midst of your changing world.
Don't lose sight of his grace and his graciousness and demonstrate the same to your world. If you turn back to chapter one and verse one, it reads simply and yet profoundly, Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, the original construction could simply be rendered Jesus Christ's apostle. In other words, Peter was sent out.
That's what apostolo means. He is an agent commissioned by Jesus Christ to fulfill the mission of Jesus Christ for him. And in a general sense, we are all sent ones. In more specific formal terminology, which he uses here, an apostle was among that group of men, personally discipled by our Lord, who had seen him after his resurrection.
Those were the qualifications. It's worth noting that Peter here and the early church adopted, as they referenced their leader, both the human name, notice that, Jesus, and they combined it with the messianic title, Christ. For us today, Jesus Christ goes together kind of like a first name and a last name.
They're inseparable and rightly so. But Christ wasn't a name. It was a title. The title meant Messiah, anointed one, a reference for the one who would come and die for the sins of the whole world. When the church was formed on Sunday, on the day of Pentecost, the earliest of creeds, what we call their earliest confession of faith, was this, and Peter will preach in Acts 2, verse 36, that Jesus is the Christ. They knew him first as Jesus, the man. They came to understand that he was divinely anointed as God the Son to become the Messiah.
That would come a little later. It's interesting, by the way, that Jesus Christ is used consistently and entirely by all of the other apostles. Only Paul reverses the order to refer to him as Christ Jesus.
And there's meaning there. It's interesting that the early apostles would all come to know him first as Jesus and then as the Christ, but for the apostle Paul, his experience was reversed. He came rather suddenly into an awareness that Jesus was deity, didn't he? He's going along that road, he's going to go capture some more Christians, and a bright light shines, and it knocks them to the ground, and a voice comes.
It's in Acts chapter 9, as everything blazed with light that would temporarily take away his eyesight. And you hear this voice, he heard it from heaven, saying, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he responded, who are you, Lord? It's kind of like saying, who's up there? Who's up there saying that?
Who's talking to me? And it must have stopped his heart when the voice responded, I am Jesus. So for all of the other commissioned apostles who had followed Jesus, the teacher, and came to know him over time as Jesus the Christ, Paul, who had not met the Lord until after his resurrection and ascension, came to know him first as deity, speaking from the heaven, and then he learned his name was Jesus. So we would often refer to him in that experiential order, Christ Jesus. Now what Peter is saying here in this opening phrase is so important, especially when his readers are going to encounter persecution for claiming this creed, for holding to this confession of faith that Jesus is none other than the divinely appointed God the Son, the Messiah.
So he opens with that. It's as if he says, look, stay with it. This is the gospel of grace. Don't veer off, you're not following the wrong man. You didn't get it wrong. He really is the Christ.
Isn't this what causes so much heartburn in our changing world? To this day, it boils down to this creed, this confession of faith that we hold today. And it is becoming more and more offensive that you and I would actually believe that Jesus is our living Lord. And he alone is the embodiment of the triune God of whom we've sung.
That he's more than just another teacher. That we believe that there is no salvation. There is salvation in no one else. For there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. John 4 verse 12. We believe that.
That's becoming more and more strange in our world today. That we would hold that. So what Peter does here is he opens with the most condensed doctrinal statement. Sort of the shortest creedal confession you can ever utter. Jesus Christ. The man is our God and Savior.
The Messiah. Now there's something else in this opening phrase. Which is all we're going to get to today in case you're wondering. What you also have here in this opening phrase is a rather startling display of God's grace. That would allow you to read the name Peter next to the title Apostle. I mean if you decided to read through the gospels and you just finished Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and you stopped.
Then you realize I really need to crank that thing back up and start reading. You just kind of flipped it open and you read 1 Peter chapter 1 and verse 1. Where Peter is an apostle you would be stunned.
If he did write a letter that God would allow to be extant for the church. You could expect it to open with something like, Peter, the man who denied Jesus Christ. Yeah, that fits. The man who didn't keep his promise to Jesus Christ. That works. The man who used to be one of the closest disciples of Jesus Christ.
That works. Instead you read Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ. So let's look at some snapshots to find out how Peter got from the ending of John chapter 22 or whatever it is to this point right here. In fact I'm going to propose to you that who Peter was and the growth he experienced will have an incredible impact on what he writes and how he does it. His past life, his past failures, his past disappointments and successes are going to make all the more vibrant and rich and nuanced and significant as you read his letter.
It's going to become all the more precious as it has been to every Christian in every generation at every time. So let's just kind of stop for a moment and let's ask the question, how did Peter get from John to 1 Peter? Who was Peter?
Especially for those of you who are younger in the faith we need to do a little digging. Well I want you to picture in your mind a fourth grade student who perpetually has his hand up in class. And when called upon he has absolutely nothing to say. But he still speaks and in so speaking reveals he has nothing to say. That's Peter. John MacArthur in his wonderful commentary on 12 ordinary men he described Peter, in fact he titled his chapter as the apostle with a foot-shaped mouth. That's pretty good.
It's true. In fact I'll never forget Howard Hendricks saying to us one time in seminary class that Peter opened his mouth only to change feet. Peter is that disciple who rushes in where angels fear to tread.
He's inquisitive, he's impulsive, he's daring. By the way, while we often are quick to find fault with the fact that he started sinking beneath the wheat, those waves out there with the wind and the boisterous waves broiling around that little boat, we often overlook the fact that he was the only one who got out. All the other disciples are clinging to their cushions hoping that they could serve as flotation devices because they thought the boat is going down. While we fault him for denying the Lord in that courtyard, he was still the only disciple who followed him that far before denying. No disciple speaks as often in the Record of Scripture as Peter does. No one talks as much as Peter. And no one is spoken to by the Lord as much as Peter. No disciple is corrected more often than Peter. Peter's the only disciple to have ever corrected the Lord, which is not a good idea. No one verbally denied Jesus more publicly than Peter, and yet no disciple ever confessed the deity of Christ more boldly than Peter.
J. Allen Blair wrote decades ago that probably no other person characterized in Scripture appears so impetuous and unstable and distrustful, and yet at the same time so bold and fearless and devoted. And by the way, all of the above, as I describe him, are reasons why we love him. We love Peter. We just sort of feel a closer kinship. More immediately, we warm up to this particular man. I mean, Paul, let's face it, really does kind of intimidate us. He's a brilliant attorney, and it's kind of like we think he's got it all buttoned down. Peter, the fisherman, is always coming loose, and we kind of like that.
We can identify with that easier, can't we? He's so clearly flawed, which we all are, but it's just so obvious with Peter. Peter was born, his given name was Simon, or Simeon in the Hebrew, although we don't have any proof he was from that tribe. His father's name was John. He had a brother named Andrew. He might have had more siblings. Only Andrew's mentioned we're not even told if Andrew was younger or older. He grew up in a fishing village on the Sea of Galilee and developed a fairly successful fishing enterprise with his brother Andrew. In fact, they joined two other brothers known as James and John. The four of them would all leave their nets and follow Jesus eventually. We know that Peter was married because his wife often traveled with him in ministry trips.
We're told in 1 Corinthians 9, verse 5, it's possible they didn't have children, no reference to them, which would have allowed her time to be more involved directly in his travel. We can conclude that his fishing enterprise was lucrative, successful enough for him to buy a home in Capernaum in what we would call an upper-middle-class district near the synagogue. The home was large enough to accommodate other disciples and the Lord. He lived there with his wife and mother-in-law, who on one occasion grew ill, and Jesus healed her, all given to us by the Gospel of Mark in chapter 1. Now, when the Lord meets Simon for the first time, he immediately nicknames him Peter. It's really more of a nickname. Cephas in the Aramaic.
Petros in the Greek means rock, stone, pebble. I think for Jesus Christ to take this impetuous, unstable, unpredictable, emotionally-driven man and at the very outset he almost prophetically says, This is the person that I'm going to make out of you. And it's going to take a lifetime of ups and downs, stops and starts. What I want to do with the time remaining is watch some of it happen in fast motion. And so what I want to do is drop into several different scenes, and I'm going to give you a caption to write next to each picture.
If you want to try to keep up and turn with me, you can. The first snapshot is found in Luke chapter 9. And the caption underneath this scene is simply a word that describes Peter at this point, and it's the word nonsense.
I thought about a lot of different words and finally settled on that one. Now, as you're turning, here's the setting. The three closest disciples to Jesus were Peter, James, and John. And they're hiking with Jesus up this mountain, and that mountain is going to be known forever as the Mount of Transfiguration, where Jesus kind of pulls back the veil of humanity and reveals the splendor of deity. And they get up to the top, and Peter is worn out, and he goes to sleep while Jesus begins to pray. And that is kind of the normal pattern with Peter.
So he's sleeping. Now, at some point, Peter wakes up, and he's startled to find Jesus talking with Moses and Elijah. And it says that the garments of Jesus are shining like the noonday sun, and Moses and Elijah are dressed in splendor.
We have no idea what that looked like, but it was just splendid. And Peter is startled, and he rubs his eyes, and he wakes up, and he steps forward. And in verse 33, he blurts out, Master, it is good for us to be here. Hey, this is great. I'm glad we're here.
He has no idea what's taking place. It's good to be here. Let's make three tabernacles. Let's set up three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah. Let's just make this permanent, which is heresy.
He's bringing Jesus down to the level of these two other prophets, Moses and Elijah, which false religions have tried to do to this very day. And then he says, let's just kind of bring on the kingdom. Let's set it up.
I like this hill. This is great. Good we're here. What do you say? One author said that he magnificently disregarded the situation and, ignoring the fact that nobody was talking to him, began to speak. And it's as if God the Father interrupts the scene and interrupts Peter. And I think he's actually raising his voice.
That's my guess. Because he says, notice, this is my beloved son. Listen to him. It's a nice way of saying, Peter, stop talking and listen to him.
Peter's voice delivers nothing more than nonsense. Another snapshot is in Matthew chapter 16. Matthew chapter 16. And you could write the caption underneath this text, insightful. This is one of the high marks of Peter's development.
We're not covering these chronologically. The Lord is asking the disciples who people say he is. He says, give me the word on the street. Who do people say I am? And in verse 14, you can hear the answer.
The disciples were found. Well, some say you're John the Baptist. Others say you're Elijah. Still others, you know, Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, because you weep a lot. So you must be Jeremiah or one of the other prophets.
And now comes the major question on this examination. Jesus says to them, but who do you say that I am? Verse 16, Simon Peter answers and you're thinking, oh, no, please, Simon, put your hand down.
He has it up. Yes, Simon Peter. Simon Peter says, you are the Christ. Notice that you are the Christ, the son of the living God.
Wow. And that will become the bedrock, the confession upon which the church will be built. The true church is built on the truth of who Jesus Christ is.
As Peter makes this profession, Jesus affirmed it and reminded us that it's the core doctrine of our entire faith. Well, we're only about halfway through this message, but we're stopping here because we're close to the end of our time today. When we come back next time, Stephen will do a little bit of review for you and then bring you the conclusion to this message called Introducing an Old Fisherman. Between now and then, we'd enjoy the opportunity to meet and interact with you. You can write to us if you address your email to info at wisdomonline.org. One of the most common ways that people interact with our ministry is through our smartphone app. The Wisdom International app contains the complete archive of Stephen's 35 years of Bible teaching. There's also the opportunity to follow along in our Bible reading plan and interact with us through that app.
You'll find the Wisdom International app in the iTunes or the Google Play stores. Thanks again for being with us today. We'll have the conclusion to this message on our next broadcast. So join us for that here on Wisdom for the Heart. Thank you.
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