Peter
Acts 2:1-14a
Prior to our Scripture today, the resurrected Jesus told the disciples to wait and pray in Jerusalem until they received the Holy Spirit. So they gathered in The Upper Room, behind locked doors still in fear of their lives and on the 50th day, a sound like a hurricane, a tornado and an earthquake all wrapped into one came. Everyone was terrified. Tongues that looked like fire came and rested on each one of them and they were filled with courage and a boldness that was not their own. Then they unlocked the doors, boldly stepped out into the streets and Peter began to preach. And miraculously every person heard him in their own native language. What a sermon it was! Peter spoke right to the hearts of those gather there that day and they were so convicted that they asked, “What can we do?” Peter told them to repent and be baptized. That day, 3,000 people came to belief in Jesus.
Peter is our fourth hero we’re looking at in this series. What can we learn from him? First, Jesus uses unlikely heroes. Being a fisherman, Peter was gruff, unkempt, vile, shabbily dressed, unlearned and illiterate. He had flunked out of rabbi school and was deemed unacceptable by the powers that be. He was brash and bold, the first of the disciples to act but that often got him in trouble, leading to mistakes and failures. He was the disciple who suggested building 3 tabernacles at the Transfiguration of Jesus, completely missing the point. It was Peter who drew his sword at the arrest of Jesus, cutting off the ear of a man. It was Peter who boasted that he would never forsake Jesus and then only hours later found himself denying Jesus not once but three times to save his own life. He had a big mouth. John MacArthur describes Peter as “the apostle with a foot-shaped mouth.” He was the first to proclaim Jesus identity. But then Jesus started talking about the need for him to suffer and die on the cross and he rebukes Jesus saying, “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” And Jesus says, “Get behind me Satan!” Talk about a low point in life when Jesus calls you Satan. There’s just five verses separating these two events and you get the sense that one minute Peter is way up here and one minute he’s way down here. We see this again when Peter stepped out of the boat and walked on water, but then he took his eyes off Jesus and his fears caused him to start to sink.
Often times, we look at our heroes with rose colored glasses. We think their ascendency to their status of hero was easy and without failures. We think they don’t have any weaknesses or sins. We look at their story and think they’re perfect in every way. Peter’s life teaches us that living our story into one worth telling is often one of fits and starts, with failures and embarrassments and some victories mixed in along the way. It’s often a two steps forward and one back journey. More than that, Peter’s story teaches us that all heroes are human, and thus flawed with weaknesses, struggles and failures just like us. Too often we think we can’t be like our heroes because we’re not perfect, so we could never be like or have a story worth telling. But Peter’s story teaches us that if he can become a hero and have a story worth telling, we can to.
Second, heroes are driven by God. It didn’t matter what he was doing, whether he was getting it right or getting it wrong, Peter was going to do it all the way. Peter was one of these “all in” kind of guys. He only had two speeds: fast and faster. It’s always amazed me that Peter, who was the first disciple called by Jesus, dropped his nets and left his boat, his friends and family and his community. Who leaves their business behind as a result of a simple invitation of two words and a promise: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men”? Peter was raised in Bethsaida, the northwest side of Sea of Galilee. Some 200 years before Jesus, it had become the seat of observant Judaism as it was repopulated with Jews returning from Babylon to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. After Herod’s death, it was given to one of his sons Herod Philip who sought to rebuild and fortify the city making it into a center of Greek thought and life. This would have only hardened the determination of Peter and the inhabitants of Bethsaida to be strictly faithful to the law. And so seeking to live a righteous life would have been at the heart of Peter’s life for himself but now Jesus calls him to live for others becoming a fisher of men. Thus, it is Peter’s faith which drives him and everything in his life.
Here’s my question: What drives you? Why are you here today? Something brought you here. Something got you up out of bed, dressed, in the car to come worship. Why are you here today? On a larger scale, what drives your life? What gets you up every morning? What keeps you going? What motivates everything you do? We all have drivers in our lives; things that keep us going. For some of us it’s guilt. For others of us, it’s fear or ambition. For others, its relationships or hope or need or desire. We all have things that are driving our lives. Even super heroes are driven by something. Batman was driven by the memory of his murdered parents. Superman was driven by the need to please his father. Spiderman is driven by the guilt over the role he played in his Uncle Ben’s death. The Hulk is driven by anger and by rage. We’re all driven by something. What is the primary driver in your life? Is it Jesus?
The big difference in Peter’s life was what was driving him. When Peter was walking on water and doing great things for God, he is spirit-driven and spirit-empowered. When Peter was failing, he was driven by fear, guilt, ambition or selfishness. So what is driving you? Here’s the Good News: you don't have to be a disciple and do the work of God in your own power. Jesus told us the Holy Spirit is a helper and a teacher; one who would come to be with us. Jesus’ promise is that the Holy Spirit is always with us and provide us the power needed.
Here’s the problem: we can receive the Holy Spirit and never really be spirit-driven. I have a car, but I can still walk to work. I have electricity at my house, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to plug in to where the power is. Just because the Spirit is available to us, does not mean we always take advantage it by allowing the Spirit to drive us. Being spirit-driven is making a conscious decision to give control of your thoughts and actions to God’s Holy Spirit that lives in you. It means you have to check your motives. You have to ask those hard questions, ‘What are you really doing and why? Who or what is really driving you? You have to get radically and sometimes painfully honest. We may be able to do a lot of good things ourselves but if we want to do God sized things and not just good things, we can’t do it alone. We need the Holy Spirit to driving us. Life in Jesus means being Spirit driven. That’s critical to being a follower of Jesus. It’s just assumed that Jesus followers are Spirit driven. Paul writes, “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” Gal. 5:25 But beware: If we truly set out to give control over the Spirit of our lives and be spirit-driven in our decisions and in our actions, often the Spirit will drive us into places we would not choose to go by ourselves. When we’re Spirit-driven, we’re jumping out of perfectly safe boats trying to defy the laws of gravity walking on water, we’re putting our lives on the like to preach the Gospel to dangerous people in dangerous places and we find ourselves following Jesus outside of our comfort zones doing things we thought we’d surely never do. When is the last time you did something crazy, dangerous, uncomfortable or impossible for Jesus?
Peter was originally named Simon, meaning pebble, but Jesus changed his name to Peter which means “rock” and said, “Upon you, I will build my church.” So Peter steps out and preaches the first sermon of the church and 3000 come to faith. Like his new name predicted, he became the leader of the disciples and the early church. He would go on to heal a lame beggar, to preach boldly before the Sanhedrin who could have crucified him as well. Even arrest, beatings, and threats could not dampen Peter’s resolve to preach the risen Christ (Acts 5). And it was Peter who broke down century old walls when he took the Gospel to Cornelius, a Roman centurion. This is what it means to be Spirit drive but it also teaches us one more thing.
Third, failure is not fatal, so don’t quit. Even after all of his missteps, his failures, his embarrassment and shame, Peter did not quit. Heroes don’t quit after a failure. Kent Hughes tells the story of a young pastor driving a borrowed pickup truck across the church lawn to his study door. Refusing assistance, he began to empty his office onto the truck bed, first the desk drawers, then the files, and finally, his library of books, which he tossed carelessly into a heap. He left the church and drove to the city dump where he threw everything into the waiting garbage. It was his way of putting behind him the overwhelming sense of failure and loss that he had experienced in the ministry. This young, gifted pastor was determined never to return to the ministry. And then he writes, “Indeed, he never did.” Thank God that didn't happen to Peter. Peter just kept getting back up. He didn’t give up. He got up, and he kept going to do the next thing. Are we going to fall on our faces? Yes. God says get back up. Do the next right thing. John Maxwell calls this “failing forward” and history is riddled with people who failed forward.
Thomas Edison failed over 100 times in making the light bulb. When asked if he felt like a failure, he said, “No, I now know 100 things that don’t work.” Jerry Seinfeld initially froze in front of the audience and was booed off the stage. But he went back to the same comedy club the next night, and left with cheers and applause, and the rest is history. Vera Wang was a talented ice skater who didn’t make the Olympic Team. Then she went to work at Vogue and was passed over for promotion. But today? She’s a successful wedding dress designer. J.K. Rowling, a single mother barely scraping by, had her first book was rejected over 40 times. Today, she is a best selling author and one of the top ten wealthiest women in England. Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, was cut from his 9th grade team. He said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/2/2e/Pioneer10.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100516074701&path-prefix=en In his book, Pastoral Grit: the Strength to Stand and to Stay, Craig Brian Larson writes:
"In 1972, NASA launched the exploratory space probe Pioneer 10….The satellite's primary mission was to reach Jupiter, photograph the planet and its moons, and beam data to earth... Scientists regarded this as a bold plan, for at that time no earth satellite had ever gone beyond Mars, and they feared the asteroid belt would destroy the satellite before it could reach its target.
"But Pioneer 10 accomplished its mission and much, much more. Swinging past the giant planet in November 1973, Jupiter's immense gravity hurled it at a higher rate of speed toward the edge of the solar system. At one billion miles from the sun, Pioneer 10 passed Saturn. At some two billion miles, it hurtled past Uranus; Neptune at nearly 3 billion miles; Pluto at almost four billion miles. By 1997, twenty-five years after its launch, Pioneer 10 was more than six billion miles from the sun. "And despite that immense distance, Pioneer 10 continued to beam back radio signals to scientists on Earth. 'Perhaps most remarkable, those signals emanate from an 8-watt transmitter, which radiates about as much power as a bedroom night light, and takes more than nine hours to reach Earth.' "The Little Satellite That Could was not qualified to do what it did. Engineers designed Pioneer 10 with a useful life of just three years. But it kept going and going. By simple longevity, it accomplished more than anyone thought possible. And then he writes, "So it is when we offer ourselves to serve the Lord. God can work even through someone with 8-watt abilities. God cannot work, however, through someone who quits." Heroes never quit but choose instead to fail forward. Amen
