A Servant

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Luke 22:54-57 "Then seizing him, they led him away and took him into the house of the high priest. Peter followed at a distance. And when some there had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and had sat down together, Peter sat down with them. A servant girl saw him seated there in the firelight. She looked closely at him and said, 'This man was with him.' But he denied it. 'Woman, I don’t know him,' he said."

Think

You are at a lunch table and somebody starts in on Christians. Maybe it is a joke about church people. Maybe it is about somebody at your school who actually takes their faith seriously, and everybody laughs. And you have about two seconds to decide what to do with your face.

You do not argue. You do not defend anybody. You just sort of smile and look at your phone and let the moment pass, and it does pass, and nobody notices, and the conversation moves on to something else. But you notice. You carry that one around the rest of the day.

That is where this story starts. Not with a hero. With a guy at a fire who says nothing.

Peter had been with Jesus for three years. He had walked on water. He had watched a dead girl sit up. He had said, out loud and in front of everybody, that he would die before he would leave. And now a servant girl, not a soldier, not a judge, not the high priest, a servant girl looks at him across a courtyard fire and says, “You were with him.”

And Peter says, “I do not know him.”

He says it three times. Luke tells us that after the third time, Jesus turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter went outside and wept bitterly. That is the lowest moment of his life, and it is on the record forever.

Here is why we are starting there.

A few weeks after this night, the same man stood in front of the most powerful religious leaders in Jerusalem, the very people who had Jesus killed, and told them to their faces about Jesus. Same man. Same voice. Same personality. Acts 4 says the people who watched it happen were astonished.

If you only ever meet the Acts 4 version of Peter, he is inspiring and completely useless to you. He becomes a highlight reel of somebody built differently than you. But if you meet the courtyard version first, something else happens. You realize the bold guy in Acts 4 used to be the quiet guy at the fire.

So the question worth sitting with today is the obvious one. What happened to this guy?

The answer is not that Peter tried harder. It is not that he gave himself a talk and decided to be braver. Something happened to him. God poured out his Spirit, and the man who was scared of a servant girl became the man who could not be silenced by a courtroom.

Which means your worst moment is not your final one.

Some of you have a courtyard moment you have not told anybody about. A time you had the chance to say something and you did not. A time somebody asked if you were one of those church kids and you laughed it off. A time you were at a party and somebody said, “Wait, do you not go to church?” and you said, “Not really,” and technically that was true because you had skipped a few weeks, but you both knew what you were doing.

And ever since, there has been a quiet voice telling you that you are disqualified. That God can use the students who never flinched, and you are not one of them.

Look at Peter. Stop and actually look at him. The man Jesus chooses to build his church on is the man who denied him at a fire. Jesus knew he would be denied by Peter before it happened. He told Peter it would happen. And he still called Peter, still restored him, still filled him, still used him.

God is not scandalized by your worst day. He was there for it. He is not standing at a distance waiting for you to become somebody more impressive before he does anything with your life.

The first step toward boldness is not pretending you were never scared. It is being honest that you were.

Peter never hid this story. It is in all four Gospels. Somebody had to tell it, and the most likely person is the man it happened to. He let it be written down. He was not embarrassed by the before picture, because he had lived the after.

Start there today. Not with a promise to be braver tomorrow. With honesty about the fire you sat at and said nothing.

Apply

Name the moment – Think of one time you had the chance to say something about Jesus and did not. Tell God about it specifically, not vaguely. Then tell him you are not asking to feel better about it, you are asking him to change you.

Pray

God, you know the moments I have stayed quiet. I am not going to pretend they did not happen. Thank you that Peter’s worst night was not the end of his story, and that mine is not the end of my story either. Change something in me this week that I could not change on my own. In Jesus’ name. Amen.