May 9, 2004 — Fifth Sunday of Easter & Mother’s Day
Christ Lutheran Church, Columbia, MD
Pastor Jeff Samelson
John 21:15-19
Past Performance Is No Guarantee of Future Results
I. The Past Is Past
II. The Present Is Now
III. The Future Is Glorious
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Word of God for our study this Sunday is found in John 21:15-19:
When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon son of John, do you truly love me more than these?"
"Yes, Lord," he said, "you know that I love you." Jesus said, "Feed my lambs."
Again Jesus said, "Simon son of John, do you truly love me?"
He answered, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you." Jesus said, "Take care of my sheep."
The third time he said to him, "Simon son of John, do you love me?"
Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, "Do you love me?" He said, "Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you."
Jesus said, "Feed my sheep. I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, "Follow me!" (NIV)
This is the Gospel of our Lord.
Dear Mothers — and their children and husbands — of all ages:
I’m sure many of you mothers out there today will soon be looking over information and prospectuses (prospecti?) from various mutual funds, stocks, and bonds and things. You’ll be trying to decide where to invest those thousands of dollars in cash you got for Mother’s Day … .
Well, anyway, even if it’s going to be years, if ever, before any of us seriously take a look at one of those brochures inviting us to invest in a particular fund or program, there’s a phrase we should all be familiar with. You see, the company that wants your money will be giving you all sorts of reasons why you should invest with them, and the thing they will tout most is how well their stocks or funds have performed over the years. But they can’t promise that the tremendous results they had before will continue in the future, so they always add — often in small print — some variation of this phrase: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
Every one of us here today makes decisions everyday about investing — not money, but our energy, our emotions, our will, and our confidence. And because of those investments we make we want to remember that same phrase — “Past performance is no guarantee of future results”— only we apply it in reverse.
I. That’s what Jesus is doing, and saying, with Peter here. These verses follow immediately after those we discussed two weeks ago, when Jesus gave his disciples a miraculous catch of 153 life-changing fish and with that assured them he would take care of all of their needs as they went out as his fishers of men.
But Peter had a very specific and personal need. His past performance seemed set to guarantee future failure. Think of how far he had fallen: All through Jesus’ ministry, Peter had been the disciple unafraid to speak up and say what all the others were only thinking. He was the one who confessed, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.’ And he was the one who, around the table at the Last Supper, declared to Jesus, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will. I will never disown you. Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death — I will lay down my life for you!” [Matthew 26:33,35;Mark 14:29,31; Luke 22:33; John 13:37] That was Peter.
Peter had shown great potential and made solemn promises — but what happened? It didn’t take long for Peter to be proved a liar and a faithless friend. He denied his Lord three times, swearing that he didn’t even know Jesus. And all Peter’s potential and promises crashed down in failure. When Jesus looked at him across the courtyard, Peter saw what he had done, and was filled with grief. And there was a consequence even beyond his sorrow: he knew that he could never stand again as a leader or example among the faithful — he had proven himself faithless. His incredible guilt and colossal failure would have been a lifelong burden, holding him down and holding him back.
Moms, I imagine you have an idea what Peter felt like. Most mothers are pretty good at loading up on guilt and labeling their failures. Very often you even take responsibility for things that aren’t really your fault. And that’s totally unnecessary, because, face it, you have enough of your own sins to deal with, don’t you? When your kids are small, you lose your temper with them. You don’t always spend enough time with them, or listen to them, or love them enough. Maybe you don’t feed them as well as you should, or make sure they get enough time to play, or exercise.
And when they’ve grown into teenagers or adults, every time they take a wrong turn you wonder what you did wrong, or at least what you might have done differently to keep them out of trouble, to guide them in making good decisions, or even to do something as basic and important as keeping them Christians. Think of the mothers of the soldiers who tortured those Iraqi prisoners — they’re probably wondering where they went wrong. Like the mother of that German teenager who wrote and distributed the Sasser worm that messed up millions of computers around the world in the last week. And can you imagine what a failure the mother of 17-year-old Carlos Chereza must feel like? He’s the boy from Ft. Myers, Florida who was arrested last month for trying to hire a hitman. For just $2000. To kill his mother — and he told the guy that when he trashed the apartment to make it look like a burglary he had to make sure nothing happened to the family’s TV.
That’s failure. And when your past is full of that, you tend to think that’s what’s going to fill your present and your future, too.
But Jesus goes out of his way here to explain to Peter that his past performance is … past. There is a guarantee attached to all his sins and failures, but it’s a guarantee of God’s grace. Peter’s sins were already all forgiven by Christ on the cross, and with that in the past, it is now time for Peter to be restored, with all his potential, position, and promise.
Jesus meets your specific, personal needs with the same message: the past is past — your sins are already forgiven. All those things you failed to do, Jesus did perfectly, in your place. And all those things you did wrong, Jesus paid for with his death on the cross, in your place. Easter’s empty tomb is your guarantee of God’s grace. So hold on to it!
Moms — the time you didn’t spend with your kids — it’s forgiven. The lessons you never got around to teaching them — you’re forgiven. Dads — the support you failed to give your wife, and the help with the house and the kids that you never found time for — it’s forgiven, for Jesus’ sake. Adult children — the guilt you’re feeling over the hurt you caused your parents over the years — it’s washed away by Christ’s blood. And you not-yet-grown children — your disobedience and disrespect for Mom and Dad are also forgiven, for good, for Jesus’ sake. Your sins are gone.
II. With that great news — with our sins and failures all behind us — Jesus now wants us to get on with the business of living in the present and doing what he’s given us to do.
That’s why it was so important that he restore Peter as he did. The message of forgiveness had already been received, but Peter wasn’t ready yet to leave his past performance in the past. You might say he had accepted Christ’s forgiveness for the next life, but not for this life, because he apparently still thought that his failure and denials disqualified him from serving his Lord.
And so Jesus lovingly, carefully, and publicly — so no one else would miss the lesson — gave Peter three opportunities — one for each of his denials — to step forward in forgiveness and be returned to Christ’s service. “Do you love me, Simon?” — “Yes, Lord, I love you.” — “Then I’m putting you back in action, Peter — you have the power and permission to serve me by serving my people: Feed my lambs. Take care of my sheep. Feed them. Follow me.”
We know from the book of Acts that Peter did step forward and follow Jesus after this. Peter had learned that his past performance had nothing to do with his present power to serve.
That’s a lesson that’s hard for many of us to learn, though. It’s so easy to focus on our sins, failures, and mistakes and convince ourselves that our past performance has guaranteed us the same kind of results in the present. It’s not that we don’t think God has forgiven us for those sins — it’s just that we don’t seem to think that forgiveness, and the power of the gospel that goes with it, make a difference in our daily lives. Well, it does!
For instance, mothers don’t let their children use one failure as an excuse to stop trying, but they may convince themselves, that the fact that they used drugs when they were young or were sexually active means that now they are disqualified from telling their sons and daughters that such things are stupid, wrong, and sinful. But God calls parents to leave the past behind and step forward and follow Jesus — and that means raising your children in the nurture and training of the Lord, not giving up and giving in to the same pressures of society that you gave into in your youth. He has restored you — you have his power to do everything he’s given you to do.
Or maybe you feel you’re stuck in a cycle of despair and abandoned dreams, all because you had some failures in your past. Maybe you failed at marriage. Maybe you messed up in your career. Maybe there’s an addiction to some drug or bad behavior. Or maybe you’re just sick and tired of the way you get great ideas, make plans, and have the best of intentions, but consistently fail to follow through — you just keep messing up. And you think that what you are and have now is the best it’s going to get. Well, if you focus on your past failures, you may be right; but if you focus on Christ and his present forgiveness, maybe you’ll realize that he has other intentions for your life. God certainly has not called you to failure!
Now, we haven’t fallen as far as Peter did, and none of us has the call Christ gave him, so we don’t have to look for Jesus to restore us in the same way that he restored Peter. Really all we have to do is trust him — trust that no matter what our sins and failures are, they are forgiven, and trust that he will give us everything we need to do what he has called us to do, whether that’s raising children, nurturing a marriage, holding a job, leading a church, getting an education, witnessing to our faith, or just being a friend. And then do it — follow, serve, do.
III. And Peter’s example here makes clear that Christ restores us after we sin not just for the present, but also for the future — a glorious future. After the third, “Do you love me?” and “Feed my sheep,” Jesus told Peter where his service would lead him — to a martyr’s death, which, you may recall, was exactly where Peter had vowed to follow Jesus on the night of the Last Supper. But Jesus was doing more than just foretelling Peter’s future — he was telling him that all his pains and sufferings and persecutions would be worthwhile, because through them all God would be glorified. His service and his struggles would have eternal results.
We’re thankful that Jesus hasn’t promised such an end for us, but the basic promise he made to Peter is the same for us: when we follow and serve Christ as he has called us to — whether that leads us to wealth or misery, to marriage or martyrdom — we bring glory to God. Our lives as Christians serve a purpose much greater than just getting through the day or the years, counting time and surviving until heaven. No, our lives come with the guarantee of glorious future results, no matter what pains or struggles lie between then and now.
These principles are well illustrated in the life of a woman named Monica. Monica was born into a Christian family, and was raised as a believer, but when she was of age she married a man who did not share her faith at all, and he demonstrated this with repeated infidelities, drunkenness, and a raging temper. Her mother-in-law’s personality apparently was about the same. And so, many people would consider her marriage to have been more than a mistake — a terrible failure.
But they had a son whom Monica loved dearly. Because Patrick, her husband, wasn’t a Christian, the boy wasn’t baptized and didn’t really have the benefit of growing up in a truly Christian environment. But she prayed and prayed, and taught him as best she could. Her son showed great talent early on, and she was proud when he left home in his teens to study, but she was heart-broken when he joined, not a Christian church, but an anti-Christian cult that appealed much more to his intellectual nature. She certainly would have had reason at that point to consider herself a failure as a mother.
But she kept praying and kept trying to lead and influence him to Christ. He became a professor, and eventually took a teaching job in Italy — and she followed him there. The years went by — her son still spurned the gospel. He slept with and lived with a woman for many years, but never married her, even though she bore him a son. His life was characterized by immorality and excess. You can imagine how many times Monica must have asked herself, “What did I do wrong? What could I have done better?” and been tempted to say, “Maybe, if only I had been a better mother ….”
But she didn’t give up, and she kept on praying and kept on witnessing through her life in Christ as well as her words. And in the end, she did not lead him to Christ — someone else did. The Holy Spirit had been working on him for more than 30 years, and finally he believed, and was baptized. But it probably never would have happened if Monica had given up and focused on her past failures.
There’s more to the story than that, though. God was greatly glorified through Monica’s faithfulness and work as a Christian wife and mother. Eventually, through her witness, her husband, Patrick, became a believer — just shortly before he died. And her son, Augustine (or Augustine), put his great intellect to use for the church.
You may have heard of him. He’s called St. Augustine. He eventually became a bishop, and although he lived in the fourth and fifth centuries, his influence on the Christian church continues to be felt today. He was a champion of the truth and fought tirelessly against the false teachings and teachers that were attacking the faith in that day. Many of his books, letters, and other writings were so highly regarded by the church that we still have them today. And in what might be called his “autobiography”, Augustine can’t seem to say enough good about his mother. Because this woman, whose world and situation were not that much different from some of yours, lived in faith and forgiveness and never let her past failures stand in the way of future results.
That’s the message today — what Jesus said to Simon Peter and says to Christian mothers and to every believer: Your sins, your failures, your mistakes, your bad decisions , your irresponsibilities, your faithlessness — they are all forgiven. They are in the past. Leave them there, and move forward in faith, in power, in confidence — in Christ. Because past performance is no guarantee of present or future results — thank God! Amen.
And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
