FBC Daily Devotional – March 25, 2021

Well, a good Thursday to you. We are starting to wind down this week already and working our way toward Palm Sunday. If you can make it to service on Sunday morning, planning on a Palm Sunday message for this particular Lord's Day.

And then of course the following Sunday, Resurrection Sunday, and in between, at Thursday night, we'll be having a week from tonight, we'll be having a Maundy Thursday service. And we look forward to that time together.

It's kind of a sobering service, but it's such a rich service, because it really gets us thinking about the crucifixion and the events that led up to it. We spend some time sharing communion together at the Lord's table, so it's just a good service.

And that'll be a week from tonight, seven o 'clock at the church in the auditorium. Well, today we're kind of working our way up to that crucifixion event in our scripture reading. And one of the, I think, most heart-wrenching scenes among the disciples is what we read about today with Peter's denial.

Boy, how easily we can criticize Peter, can't we? And we read these accounts in the Bible, and we can sit at arm's length away from them, you know, a couple thousand years away from them, but really at arm's length.

We hold the scriptures out at arm's length, and we read it, and you know, we shake our heads, and we go, tsk, tsk, tsk, shame on Peter, why, you know, Peter should never have done that. Yeah, he shouldn't have, but how armchair quarterback we can be, as if we were there, we would have done something differently.

Would we? Would you? Let me ask you this, would you even be in that courtyard? You remember when the garden, all the disciples forsook Jesus and fled, and all but, you know, Peter and John, you know, they followed at a far-off distance and found out where this trial, this mock trial or whatever is going to be held, and so they followed, and they ended up in this courtyard where Jesus was.

Would you even have been there, or would you have been one of those other disciples who are hunkering down in fear somewhere? I, knowing myself, yeah, you know, I don't think I would have been there. But here's Peter, and how critical we can be of Peter, denying the Lord these three times.

Shouldn't we instead sympathize with him? I mean, let's be honest, what would you have done if you were in his place? Again, put yourself there by that fire, warming your hands, and you see Jesus bound, you know, up ways away, and you see him being mistreated, and you hear the hostility in the voices, and you hear all the anger and everything, and there you are standing there warming your hands in the fire, and this servant girl says, oh, you're one of his followers, aren't you?

Would you have said, yep, I sure am. I sure am. I kind of doubt it. Maybe you would have, but I kind of doubt it. And yet, here's Peter, he loved the Lord, he really did, and yet in this moment of weakness, like so many of us in our moments of weakness, he clammed up, and worse, he said, no, I'm not a follower of his.

So let's be honest with ourselves. How many times in your Christian experience have you kept silent about your faith out of some kind of fear? You know, fear of ridicule, fear of rejection, fear of condescension, condescending attitude toward you because you're one of them, that kind of thing.

How many times have you done that? I remember being like this almost exclusively during those, you know, teen years, you know, in high school, and so I went to a public high school in the Chicago suburbs, thousands of kids, and the Christian kids in the high school were in this very small minority, and yeah, well, most of us just kind of blended right in.

We didn't want to make much waves, and that was like that for me until my senior year and started to get some things right with the Lord, and I remember being challenged one time at a youth group or whatever to be bold and carry your Bible to school.

I said, okay, I'll do it, you know, and I took my Bible to school, but you know what I did? I stuck it in the middle of my books. I didn't put it up on top, even though the guy said, don't put it in the middle, put it up on top.

Well, you know, I think, come on, how many times have we been like that, and yet we're going to criticize Peter? Nah. And then when confronted with your sin, as Peter was when he heard that cock crow, and he recalled that Jesus said that night he was going to deny him, and sure enough, he has just done so, and he has been confronted head-on with his sin of denial.

When you're so confronted by your sin, how do you respond? Do you respond with Peter's level of conviction and grief? Well, I think in that regard, we should take some cues from Peter and be more like Peter in our repentance, in our contrition, in our grief over our sin.

So I trust God will give us grace to be more bold in our testimony for Christ, at the same time to be more sympathetic and compassionate, because we know we're not as bold as we ought to be, and we see this kind of behavior in Peter, and we see it in ourselves.

But may we also see the kind of contrition and the grief over our sin that Peter expresses. So we can take some lessons, good and bad, from this one experience of the Apostle Peter. Well, may God help us to learn.

Peter’s Denial and Our Own Fear of Witnessing

Father in heaven, we do grieve over Peter's denial, but we are encouraged by his repentance. But we also need to be grieved over our own acts of fear and clamming up and not even speaking up for Christ when we have wonderful opportunities to do so.

Forgive us of these things and give us a heart of brokenness over our sin, like Peter's, we pray. And this we ask in Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen. All right, well have a good rest of your Thursday, and I hope the end of your week here goes well, and God will bless you today, tomorrow as you wrap up the work week, and then look forward into the weekend.

Have a good day. God bless.