Sifted, Then Lifted Series

Good morning! Please open your Bibles to Luke 22.

If you are a football fan, you may already know the answer to this question: which running back holds the record for career rushing yards? Correct. Emmitt Smith. Over the course of fifteen seasons, most of them with the Dallas Cowboys, Emmitt Smith ran for 18,355 yards. That’s 55,065 feet. Nearly ten and a half miles.

Now, in any other context, running ten and a half miles in fifteen years wouldn’t be much of an accomplishment. Back in the day when I was training for marathons, I would run ten miles a day.

But there’s a big difference. When I was training for marathons, I wasn’t getting tackled every four and a half yards. Emmitt Smith was.

Emmitt Smith is in the NFL Hall of Fame because no matter how many times he got knocked down, he got up again. In his career, Smith was tackled hundreds of times. But that didn’t stop him from jumping up, dusting himself off, and running the next play.

And that’s a word that we all need to hear sometimes. How do you respond when you get knocked down? How come God lets you get knocked down in the first place?

Over the course of this next week, we will finish our reading in the gospels and move on to Acts. And for the past few Sundays, we’ve been looking at Jesus, obviously the main character in the gospels. But I don’t want to leave the gospels without talking about the second most prominent character in the gospels, and that’s Simon Peter. Because I see in Simon Peter a guy kind of like Emmitt Smith. He has a pretty impressive highlight reel—getting called to follow Jesus, walking on water, going up on the Mount of Transfiguration and seeing Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, Jesus telling him that he had the kind of faith Jesus would build his church on.

At the same time, Peter got knocked down a lot too. The same Peter who walked on water sank when he got overwhelmed by the wind and the waves. The same Simon Peter who was given the nickname “rock” by Jesus was called “Satan” (also by Jesus) just a few verses later, when he contradicted him. And this morning, we are going to look at Peter’s biggest tackle, and the scene that led up to it. So if you are physically able, I would invite you to stand to honor the reading of God’s Word as we look at Luke 22:29-34:

28 “You are those who have stayed with me in my trials, 29 and I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, 30 that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

31 “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you,[d] that he might sift you like wheat, 32 but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” 33 Peter[e] said to him, “Lord, I am ready to go with you both to prison and to death.” 34 Jesus[f] said, “I tell you, Peter, the rooster will not crow this day, until you deny three times that you know me.”

[Pray]

What Does it mean to Be Sifted?

Sifting. It was the last step in producing usable wheat that could be ground into flour. After the stalks of wheat were harvested, they were taken to the threshing floor, where they were laid on the ground and trampled. This would loosen the inedible chaff from the grains of wheat. Sometimes, it was done by hand with a tool.

For larger harvest, cows, donkeys, or oxen were used to walk in circles over the stalks (Deuteronomy 25:4). Some farmers even owned a sled-type device that had sharp teeth set into the bottom of it. This device was pulled by an animal across the wheat stalks to speed up the work.

After threshing the wheat, there was the winnowing, where the farmer used a winnowing fork (something akin to our pitchfork) to gather the stalk remains off the ground and throw them up into the air so the wind could blow away the chaff The usable grain fell back to the earth and was collected.

Finally, the wheat is sifted. You took a sieve—which was a shallow basket with a screen bottom, and you shook the basket, making anything that wasn’t wheat fall through the screen.

So that’s the whole process. No big deal, right? But try to imagine it from the wheat’s perspective. There you are in your field, just growing, enjoying the sunshine, when all of the sudden you’re cut down. You and all your stalk friends are gathered up and thrown down on the ground where you’re beaten up, trampled underfoot, and run over. Then you’re stabbed with a pitchfork and tossed around in the air a few times. And after all that, you’re put into a basket and shaken up.