The
Lord blessed with a wonderful Wednesday. It was warm and beautiful.
I played hooky yesterday. I had some friends come for lunch.
I fixed wild salmon and elk meat for curry. It was wild. Some very
generous people living in Utah had sent me some Elk meat a few months
ago. One Russian friend had given me lots of wild salmon that he had
caught. Praise the Lord for the bounty of the earth the Lord lavishes
upon us in every season. We had a great time sharing the simple gifts and
rich fellowship in Jesus. Our church hosted a community dinner in the
evening. It is a great opportunity to welcome the friends and neighbors
and share sweet fellowship of Jesus with them. Our people prepared the
dinner with much joy and served it with much grace .
Please
pray for our young teenage friend Natalie. She was visiting Belize with
her family and contracted Dengue fever, She is being flown back to the
States and going for hospitalization. Natalie is beautiful
teenager. She belongs to the first Church we served in 1978.
Praise the Lord for the sights and the sounds of the Lenten season. There
are some sounds that we do not hear very often. One of them is the sound of
a rooster crowing. I grew up with the sounds of Rossters every
morning back in the village in Orissa, India. We did not have watches or
clocks to remind us of the time. There were no alarm clocks
to wake us with the new dawn. The roosters would crow every
morning a first, second, and then a third time - invariably -
without failure. By the time the rooster crew the third time it was
morning. We in our modern context can hear almost anything, but you
would probably have to go to a zoo to hear a rooster crowing. We have all
the sounds that go with modern life —cars and buses, trains and trucks, sirens
and whistles in abundance. In a crowded city you can hear kids yelling,
music blaring, cash registers ringing, and planes roaring overhead but it is
unlikely that you will ever hear a rooster crowing. On one of my visits to the Holy Land we were staying in the
old City of Jerusalem. I was stunned and surprised to hear a
rooster crow early in the morning.
If most Americans heard a rooster crowing tomorrow morning at sunrise, they would hardly know what to do. Roosters don’t belong in urban settings. They belong out in the country where they can sound forth just before dawn and wake the sleepers with the news that a new day has come. God made roosters to serve as trumpets of the morning, to signal that a new day has come. They rouse sleepers from their beds and remind the kids to get up and milk the cows. It is quite an unforgettable sound
Peter knew all about roosters, having grown up in the rural area of Galilee and was used to the daily singing of the rooster chorus. He had heard roosters crowing since the day he was born. The sound was completely familiar to him. The rooster’s crow meant, “Wake up! Get up! A new day is beginning!” Over the years he had probably heard that sound a thousand times or more, but of all the crowing of all the roosters, one had the greatest impact. One Friday morning in Jerusalem the rooster crowed, and Peter would never forget it. As long as he lived, it was a scar on his memory. He told the story so often that it was written down four different times—once by Matthew, once by Mark, once by Luke, and once by John.
The story itself was repeated over and over again by the first generation of Christians. Peter had denied Christ to a servant girl. Not to the high priest. Not to a soldier. Not to anyone important. But to a menial maid. I
The words of Jesus. Matthew, Mark and Luke all stress that when the rooster crowed, Peter remem-bered the words of Jesus, “Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.” It was this memory more than anything else that brought Peter back to God. Not only had Peter fallen, he had fallen after his vain boasting. It had happened just as Jesus predicted. Those words—spoken in love—had lodged themselves deep within the crevasses of Peter’s mind. So much had happened in those few hours that Peter had forgotten. But at the opportune moment, he remembered what Jesus had said.
It is true that Peter was loud, profane and vulgar that night. It
is also true that underneath it all he loved Jesus and was there
in the courtyard—with all his faults—keeping an eye on him. At heart Peter was
a good man who failed to live up to the best intentions of his heart.
Satan often attacks us
at the point of our strength, not the point of our weakness. After all, had not
Peter boldly said, “Even if everyone else deserts you, I will never desert
you?”
But when Satan
attacked, it came so suddenly, so swiftly, so unexpectedly that the “bold
apostle turned to butter.” By himself Peter is helpless. In the moment of
crisis, Peter fails in the very point where he pledged to be eternally
faithful.
Our Lord, allows us to fail in order to strip away our excessive self-confidence. Never again would Peter brag on himself like he did that night. Never again would he presume to be better than his brothers. Never again would he be so cocky and self-confident. All that was gone forever, part of the price Peter paid for his failure in the moment of crisis.
It is a good thing that the Lord allows this to happen to us. By falling flat on our faces we are forced to admit that without the Lord we can do nothing but fail. The quicker we learn that (and we never learn it completely) the better off we will be. Failure never seems to be a good thing when it happens, but if failure strips away our cocky self-confidence, then failure is ultimately a gift from God. It is called the sacrament of failure. There is hope for all of us—the best of us, the worst of us, and the rest of us.
In Christ,
Brown
https://youtu.be/nllfVcVdwCI
No comments:
Post a Comment