Scripture: John 21:15-25

! A Look At The Story

Ø      A group of discouraged disciples. We have a group of discouraged disciples who had suffered the ultimate defeat and had returned to what was familiar to them.  There was safety there – they knew that they would not fail with their nets.  They had know that life before and the dreams that Christ had awakened within their lives had vanished.  There was no leader now – no one to follow and so they retreated.

Spurgeon:  called to a church at 23, addressing crowds of 5000 at 30.  He wrote this:

Before any great achievement in my life, some measure of depression is very usual.  Such was my experience when I first became a pastor in London; my success appalled me and the thought of that career which seemed to be opening up, so far from elating me, cast me into the lowest depths out of which I uttered my misery.  I found no room for a Gloria in Excelsis.

Who was I that I should continue to lead so great a multitude?  I would slip away to my village obscurity or prefer to emigrate to American and find a solitary nest in the backwoods. It was just then that the curtain was rising on my greatest life's work and I dreaded what it might reveal to me.  I hope I was not faithless!  But I was timorous and filled with a sense of my own unfitness.  This depression sweeps over me whenever the Lord is preparing a larger blessing for my life and ministry.

Some of you are right at the door.

Encouragement and Discouragement:

A number of frogs were traveling through the woods.  Two of them fell into a deep pit. All the other frogs gathered around the pit.  When they saw how deep the pit was, they told the two frogs that they were as good as dead. The two frogs ignored the comments and tried to jump up out of the pit with all of their might. The other frogs kept telling them to stop, that they were as good as dead. Finally, one of the frogs took heed to what the other frogs were saying and gave up. He fell down and died.  The other frog continued to jump as hard as he could. Once again, the crowd of frogs yelled at him to stop the pain and just die. He jumped even harder and finally made it out.  When he got out, the other frogs said, "Did you not hear us?" The frog explained to them that he was deaf.

He thought they were encouraging him the entire time. 

This story teaches two lessons:

1.  There is the power of life and death in the tongue. An encouraging word to someone who is down can lift them up and help them make it through the day.

2.  A destructive word to someone who is down can be the push over the edge.  Be careful of what you say.  Speak life to those who cross your path. Anyone can speak words that can rob another of the spirit to push forward in difficult times.  Special is the individual who will take the

time to encourage another. Be kind to others.

Ø      A relationship with Peter that was not reconciled. This is the first record of Peter – speaking with Christ since his denial.  He was perhaps the most wounded for he had been the most vocal.  He was ready to follow Christ to the death or so he said.  He was the only one who had spilt blood in the garden of Gethsemane and then when Christ told him to lay down his arms, he could not seem to find it in him to die without a fight – perhaps with a fight he could have faced death but that was not to be.  So he chose to flee.  There is only one way to heal a fractured relationship – that is to sit down and talk with the person face to face in total honesty.  Not accusing or defending, merely reporting what you are experiencing in your own heart and then talking about that together.  Someone has to make the first step.

To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness.  To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.  This is hard.  It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single injury.  But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life -- to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son -- how can we do it?  Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."  We are offered forgiveness on no other terms.  To refuse it means to refuse God's mercy for ourselves.  There is no hint of exceptions and God means what He says.  ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), "On Forgiveness"

FORGIVENESS

Forgiveness is something we give without expectations.  If we forgive with expectations it is not forgiveness at all.  Forgiveness heals our soul and brings us to peace.  When we forgive we set ourselves free.  Free from judgment of others and judgment of self.  So forgive yourself and others as soon as you possibly can.  Forgiveness is the key to being a happy and free person.  When we harbor resentment we become a prisoner of our own making.

Annie

Ø      His flight precipitated his denial. Once you start running it’s difficult to stop.  dHe was frightened by the thought that a tiny servant girl could have recognized him and he denied his Lord.  Not once but three times.

Ø      A look at Christ that melted his heart. It was merely a look at Christ that melted his heart and in many ways made him every bit as much a traitor as Judas who deliberately sold him out.  It was most likely because he was with Judas that he found entrance to the court of Caiaphas.  He as well would have been seen to be a traitor – another of the gang who was in on the whole plan as far as they might have seen it.

The Process Of Restoration For Peter.

Ø      He asked him for a re-affirmation of his choice. Where do you really want to be and what do you really want to me doing.  Is this what you want your life to be all about?

Ø      A restatement of his commission. Feed my lambs.

Ø      He gave him a reminder of the cost for him personally.  What he ran away from in the garden would return to visit him again.

Peter’s Response

Ø      Someone to share his misery.  Looking for someone else to blame.  There are 20 people speeding on the road and you are the chosen one??  Why does that happen and does it really make a difference?

Peter was hurt because he had asked him three times.  He had denied Christ three times and now for each denial he was being called to re-visit what he had done and to give a new answer.  The process of repentance is a painful one.  I remember being forced by my parents to make restitution for bad things that I had done as a child.  One in particular, I had called a young girl some names. I was just a part of a group of cruel kids.  So far as I know I was the only one who was taken to face the one that I had verbally abused and I had to produce a heartfelt apology.  I can still feel the embarrassment as I talk about it.  But you know what – I never did it again – never did anything like it again to anyone else.  I learned my lesson.  I tried to tell my parents that there were others who were just as guilty or perhaps more and yet it didn’t matter to them.  Those were other accounts that had nothing to do with the fact that I was guilty – plain and simple.  “What about Bim?”, I might have asked or another name – didn’t matter.  I was the guilty one and it kept coming back at me.

That’s exactly what Jesus did when Peter asked, “What about him?”  A truly repentant heart focuses not for a minute on anyone else but himself and his own sin, his own wrong choices – regardless of how justified or provoked we might have been.  (It’s me, it’s me O Lord, standing in the need of prayer, it’s me, it’s me O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.)

Ø      Christ’s admonition for true repentance.  What is that to you?

The world does not think it strange when people wreck their bodies, destroy their homes, and ruin their lives by running from one sin to another!  But let a drunkard become sober, or an immoral person pure, and the family thinks he has lost his mind!

The Protestant penchant for privatizing faith and relegating confession to a singular transaction between that person and God has meant a loss of accountability....  Anyone can breathe a silent prayer that amounts to little more than a "Sorry, God" and presume to get on with life.  How, if things are to be so private and "under the table," is the sinner and the sinned against to know if there has been genuine sorrow and change of heart?

n      Gordon MacDonald, Rebuilding Your Broken World

Repentance means that I own responsibility for my part in what was unsatisfactory behavior.  I accept responsibility for my part in what is and what will be new behavior.

Repentance is owning responsibility for what was, accepting responsibility for what is, and acting responsibly now.

It is responsible action.  It is not a matter of punishing ourselves for past mistakes, hating ourselves for past failures, and depressing ourselves with feelings of worthlessness.

Repentance is finishing the unfinished business of my past and choosing to live in new ways that will not repeat old unsatisfactory situations. In the full Christian meaning of the Word, repentance is a process.  It is a thawing out of rigid lifestyles into a flowing, moving, growing, repenting process.

One by one He took them from me

All the things I valued most; 'Til I was empty-handed,

Every glittering toy was lost. And I walked earth's highways, grieving,

In my rags and poverty. Until I heard His voice inviting,

"Lift those empty hands to Me!" Then I turned my hands toward heaven,

And He filled them with a store Of His own transcendent riches,

'Till they could contain no more. And at last I comprehended

With my stupid mind, and dull, That God cannot pour His riches

Into hands already full.

   -- Unknown

METANOIA IS A NECESSITY FOR THE CHURCH

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world - and might even be more difficult to save. --C. S. Lewis

The monastic orders of the Dark Ages could not have modeled communities of character if they had looked like the troubled world about them. Today, in a new age darkened by the collapse of character and the dissolution of faith, the church cannot model the Kingdom of God if it is conformed to the kingdoms of man.

Too often in recent years the church has suffered from the same collapse of character that is so widespread in our culture. Too often the church has been apathetic, marked by individualism, and constrained by the love of self rather than the love of Christ.

If the church today is to be the church, it must diligently protect its spiritual integrity. This begins with what the Greeks called metanoia, which means a change of mind - and is translated in the New Testament as repentance.

The repentance that God desires is not just contrition, or acknowledgment and confession of our sin. It is also a daily attitude and perspective.

Repentance is the process by which we see ourselves, day by day, as we really are: sinful, needy, dependent people. It is the process by which we see God as He is: awesome, majestic, and holy.

Repentance is the essential manifestation of regeneration that sets us straight in our relationship to God and so radically alters our perspective that we begin to see the world through God's eyes, not our own.

Repentance is the ultimate surrender of self. It is a radical change of mind that goes beyond spiritual stirring and inklings of interest. Unless there is metanoia, God has not been allowed to take control. An unrepentant Christian is a contradiction in terms.

Repentance is the first of Martin Luther's 95 Theses: When our Lord and master Jesus Christ said 'repent', He willed that the entire life of believers be one of repentance.

Repentance is the first word of the Gospel. It is the centerpiece of John the Baptist's message. Repent and believe were Jesus' first words in the account of Mark, and His last words to the disciples commanding them to preach repentance and forgiveness and forgiveness of sins.

Repentance for Christians, is both individual and as a body.  Each person needs to reflect a life of repentance just as the corporate church needs to model that same attitude of faith and life.

Repentance is a rare message in today's church because it requires confrontation with an uncomfortable subject - sin.  And sin does not sell well in our feel-good culture. When sin gets personal, people get skittish. Only the conviction of personal sin, however, brings us to Christ.

Charles W. Colson

IT

   They laugh and smile and talk and embrace  and I do too.

   But sometimes my smile covers a tear.

   And no one knows.

   Right now my tear is from an it.

   I'm sorry, so very sorry I did it.

   I feel like a broken record and the skip

   is the it that never completely goes away.

   What would they think if they knew my it?

   Would the laughs vanish?  The smiles disappear?

   Would the talk be hurled at me?  The embrace taken back?

   Do they have an it?

   What do they do with it?

   Why do we act for each other when there is no play?

   There is only life.

   And that life includes a lot of it.

   The point is not to celebrate it

   but only to admit to it.

   I am told Jesus knows everything

   which means he know about it.

   And yet he whispers

   in words too good to be true

   I died for you -- don't worry about it.

   -- Chip Heim