Common Men, Uncommon Calling: Peter, Part 2

Luke 6:14

     Well I don't know about you, but I'm loving every week in the gospel of Luke.  You get an hour of it on Sunday morning, and I get about 15 or 18 hours of it during the week.  And what a joy and pleasure it is to study in depth this tremendous gospel.  I only wish I could share with you everything that I'm learning in the process.  But I sort of distill it down and give you a small dose.

     We're in chapter 6, Luke's gospel.  We're here for the truth, holding forth the Word of life which is the Bible, the Scripture.  And we proclaim the Word of God as it comes verse by verse.

     We find ourselves in Luke 6:12 through 16, the ministry of Jesus is going on.  He has many disciples following Him now.  Disciple is the word mathetes in Greek, it means a learner.  Many people following and learning.  But at this juncture He decides to select twelve out of the learners and make them Apostles.  Train them to be preachers, essentially.  Their responsibility is going to be to take the gospel throughout Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the outer most part of the earth.

     They are identified in this passage, these twelve.  Simon called Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon also, second Simon among the twelve, this one called the Zealot, Judas the son of James, there are two of them as well, and Judas Iscariot who became a traitor.  Twelve Apostles.

     And we've been saying in our introductory material to the study of these men that God always has to do His work through unworthy and incapable people because that's the only kind He has.  You see, the reason for that is the work of God is spiritual.  The work of God is divine.  The work of God is supernatural.  The work of God is miraculous.  The work of God is eternal.  And human beings have no natural capacity to do that kind of work.  The best that we can do, our best intellectual service, our best social service, our best contribution to the arts, our best approach to the trades, the crafts, the professions of the world are always human and they never get beyond that.  And so they have no impact on that which is eternal in and of themselves. 

     If God then is to use incapable natural people to do spiritual, miraculous, supernatural, eternal work, something dramatic has to happen to those people.  There has to be a real transformation and there has to be an infusion of divine power.  And so, God is in the transformation business.

     Having determined to do His work through people, He has to transcend their natural limitations, their deficiencies and accomplish an eternal work through a temporal agent.  And God has nobody to work with but human beings, that's by choice.  And interestingly enough, of all the human beings that He might choose to work with, He generally chooses the lowest.  First Corinthians 1 says, "Not many noble, not many mighty, but rather He chooses the base and the common and the weak in order in the end that He might get the glory and He might shame the wise."

     In choosing those whom He calls to do His supernatural, divine, miraculous, spiritual, eternal work He has to deal with human beings.  But He bypasses the upper echelons, the elite, the noble, the influential, the wealthy and He goes with the people at the bottom of the ladder.  In that way, He puts to shame the wise and also brings glory to Himself because when you look at the people He uses, the only conclusion would be it was God and not them.  It's always been God's way.  He has nobody to use but imperfect and sinful men and women and He seems to choose those who are so unlikely that the power may clearly be of God and not of us.

     I mean, just look at history.  He chose Noah to be the father of the new humanity after the Flood.  But soon after God had delivered Noah and his family from the Flood that came about as a divine judgment on sin, Noah became drunk and acted grossly and indecently.  And then there was Abraham.  God chose Abraham to be the father of Israel, to be the father of the race of people through whom the Redeemer would come and to whom the Word of God would be revealed.  God chose Abraham to be the father of the faithful, but it was Abraham who doubted God, lied about His wife, committed adultery with her maid and brought conflict into the world which is still going on.  You can read about it in every newspaper every day in the Middle East.

     The son of promise was born to the family, his name was Isaac.  Isaac was another flawed individual who told a similar lie about his wife he had learned from his father, I suppose.  And then out of Isaac came Jacob and Jacob took advantage of his brother Esau's weakness, extorted the birthright from him.  And then God chose a man through whom...or to whom He would reveal His law and through him to the people of God.  The man's name was Moses and Moses was a murderer.  And Moses was very proud.  In fact, in an act of pride he struck the rock and the water came forth when God told him to speak to the rock.  He was garnering for himself some prestige, rather than speaking as God had told him and letting the people know it was God who opened the rock and brought the water.

     Then there was his brother Aaron whom God selected to be the first high priest.  And it was Aaron who led the people of Israel into erecting a golden calf and idolatrous worship and attendant sin was going on so that Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the law of God and smashed the law in an act of anger against what his brother had generated down below.  Moses was replaced as a leader by Joshua.  Joshua disobeyed the Lord by making a treaty with the Gibeonites instead of destroying them which God had told him.  Then even Gideon had so little confidence in himself and even less in God's plan and God's power and yet he's known as a great leader.  And then there was Samson who was a hero by almost every measure in the Old Testament and yet Samson was repeatedly beguiled by Delilah by his great lust for her to the degree that he was blinded.

     David, the writer of the sweet songs of Israel, committed adultery and murder, was an almost total failure as a father.  Was never allowed to build the temple of God because he was a man of blood.  And then there was Elijah, the great prophet, some say the greatest prophet, who foolishly stood before Ahab and fifty false prophets of Baal, invincible but coward before one woman, Jezebel.  Then there was Ezekiel who was brash and crusty and quick to speak his mind.  And then there was Jonah, that reluctant prophet who defied God's call to preach to the Ninevites.  And when he finally preached and they all repented, he was mad at God.

     Then there was the Apostle Paul in the New Testament who even at the end of his life said he was the chief of sinners.  And then there was Peter who will be our subject this morning, the leader of the Twelve who was so strongly influenced by Satan that Jesus called him Satan.  And it was Peter who denied Jesus in the most blatant and outrageous denial recorded in the New Testament.

     But so it is in the Kingdom.  Do you feel at home there?  This is how it is in the Kingdom.  These are only humans.  And like all the rest of us, they have all of the elements of fallenness.  Apart from the brief history of the Son of God on earth, God has only worked through unworthy and incapable sinners.

     To bring that all down to one particularly interesting individual, John the Baptist.  Jesus said in Matthew 11:11 that John the Baptist was the greatest man who ever lived.  But as a peak, he rose above all the towering peaks that I've just recorded for you in the Old Testament.  The greatest man who ever lived was John the Baptist.  No money, no political power, no social status, no religious position, no wardrobe, no house, he wandered around in the deserts like a homeless nomad, clothed in camel skin eating locusts and wild honey.  And Jesus said he was the greatest man who ever lived.

     The Bible doesn't say anything about his intellect.  It doesn't say anything about his methodology.  It doesn't say anything about his techniques.  He was the greatest man who ever lived simply because he was given the greatest ministry that any man ever had, and that was to announce the arrival of Messiah.

     You see, the definition of greatness has to do with the message that one proclaims.  The greatest man would be the one who proclaimed the greatest message.  It has little to do with the man and everything to do with his message.  It has little to do with the man's ability and talents, and everything to do with the way God used him.  It was the way God used Noah that made him great.  It was the way God used Abraham that made him great, and Isaac and Jacob.  It was the way God used Moses and Aaron that made them great.  It was the way God used Joshua, Gideon and Samson and David and Elijah and Ezekiel and Jonah and Paul and Peter and most of the Apostles.  It was the way God used them that made them remarkable men remembered in history.  It isn't the man himself, it is the way God uses the man.

     And the New Testament, just as a footnote, doesn't teach Christian leaders to follow the methods or the styles of the Apostles.  It doesn't say that.  It doesn't even give any details about their strategies for evangelism, or for other kinds of ministries.  As would be true of all those that God uses through the scriptures is also true of the Apostles, the issue is never methodology, the issue is never strategy, the issue is always power--power and the power always comes from the Lord.

     What made the Apostles powerful is the same thing that made the rest of those heroes of faith powerful, all of those that would be listed in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews.  What made them all heroes, what made them all memorable, what made them the peaks, as it were, of redemptive history was not what they were in themselves but what God made them into.  And it comes down to two things...they had tremendous spiritual power, and they were the agents of the truth.  And that is essentially what ministry is all about.  It's all about divine truth empowered by the Spirit.  It's all about the Word and the Spirit for us.  It's all about the Word of God, the Bible, Spirit empowered through the agent, the instrument. 

     Emphasizing methods, emphasizing technique, emphasizing strategy in the books are ad infinitum, ad nauseam on that in the Christian bookstores.  Emphasizing all of that inevitably weakens the church.  You can see books on how to strengthen your church, they will immediately weaken it.  Discussions of methods and strategies and practices of famous and visible pastors and Christian leaders inevitably weakens the church and at no time in history has this misguided emphasis been more dominant than it is in the church today.  Consequently the church is as weak as its ever been.  When the methods of men are elevated, the Word of God is diminished.  When the power of men is elevated, the power of Christ is lowered.  And when men and their technique become the patterns to follow, the church is weakened, the work of Christ is hindered severely.  It is when men are nothing that Christ is everything.  It is when men have no strategy and no method that the truth prevails.  As Paul said in 2 Corinthians 12, he rejoiced in his weaknesses because in his own weakness, Christ's strength was effective.  The Lord always seemed to be content to choose the weakest and the lowliest because they would be the most disposable to Him so that His power and His truth would prevail. 

     So when we look at the Twelve here in the sixth chapter of Luke, we meet twelve very common men...very common men, with no political stature, no economic stature. The only one who had money probably was Matthew and he had gained it by extortion through his tax collecting franchise with Rome.  The rest of them are very common men, very common.  In fact we don't know very much about them at all.  But we do know this, none of them was a Pharisee, none of them was a Sadducee, none of them was a priest, a chief priest, a scribe.  They had no religious stature whatsoever.  They were very common men. 

     They were not prominent in society.  They were not prominent in religion.  They were not prominent in politics.  They were not prominent in education.  We know amazingly little about them and it's really not important.  We don't have any sort of curriculum vita on the Twelve.  We don't have any kind of stuff about where they were born and how they were trained and where they were educated and where they worked and their employment record and what qualifies them to this job.  We don't have any of that information whatsoever because qualifying for this job was pretty simple.  You just needed to be a person who was available to speak the truth of God in the power of the Spirit of God.  The truth is in the...the power, I should say, is in the truth and in the Spirit.

     So here's a common collection of men.  And yet there never was a group so critical to the history of the world as these twelve.  I mean, they're going to carry the gospel from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria to the ends of the earth.  They're critical to the purposes of God, critical to the extension of gospel truth.  And they served their purpose very well.  So well that in the millennial Kingdom, the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth to come in the future, it says they will reign on twelve thrones over the twelve tribes of Israel.  They're going to go from being commoners to being, as it were, kings in the millennial kingdom when they reign over the tribes of Israel.  And beyond that, they are memorialized eternally because in the new Jerusalem, the capital city of the eternal heavens, there are twelve gates and at the foot of each gate is a foundation stone and engraved in those twelve foundation stones of the twelve gates of the holy city are the twelve names of the Apostles.  And yet to start with, they were the commonest of common people to illustrate how God uses common people for uncommon callings.

     Now as common as any of them was a man named Simon.  Let's look at Simon again.  He's the first one.  And we're taking a little longer with him because he really is the most dominant in the Twelve and in the New Testament.  And so we're going to spend a little bit of time getting to know him.

     Verse 14, "Simon, whom He also named Peter."  Simon, a very common name. There's another man named Simon listed at the bottom of verse 15 who was a Zealot and we'll say more about him when we get there.  But this Simon Jesus also named Peter so he had two names.  And I told you last time, that gave Jesus immediate access into his heart.  He called him Simon when he was acting like his old self.  He called him Peter when he was acting like the way the Lord wanted him to act.  Peter is the word petros in the Greek and it means rock.  Jesus named him rock.  He was Rock Bar-Jona, son of John, son of Jonah, son of Jonas, you can transliterate that a number of ways.

     He was a fisherman from the Sea of Galilee who was born in the village of Bethsaida along with his brother Andrew, Andrew Bar-Jona, they were brothers.  They grew up in the fishing business.  They moved eventually to Capernaum which was the major city on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee.

     Jesus had called him to follow Him sometime before this, along with calling Andrew and along with calling others.  Jesus was gathering disciples.  Some came at their own will, some He called to follow Him.  And Jesus gave him a name that Jesus could use to help him grow and develop into the man He wanted him to be.  As Simon he was brash and bold and mouthy and vacillating and weak and shifting.  And that was no good for the leadership responsibility the Lord wanted him to have.  So He wanted him to be firm and strong and resolute and unbending and unwavering and He needed to sort of move him in that direction so He gave him a name that might work as a sort of a subliminal reminder of what he should be, named him rock, even though at the beginning he wasn't.  At the middle of his training he wasn't.  And frankly, at the end of his training he wasn't.  But eventually he became a rock.  He needed to be rock and so Jesus named him Rock.

     When Jesus called him Simon, He was usually speaking to him in a sinful situation.  When he was sinful, when he was acting like his old self, He called him Simon.  When he was doing what he ought to have done, when he was doing the right thing, or in process toward the right thing, Jesus called him Peter, Rock.  So his name became a way in which the Lord could manage his attitudes.

     Now some of you asked me about a couple of passages in the Scripture where when Peter was obviously in a sinful situation he is called Peter and you asked me...is that inconsistent?  Keep this in mind, there are too many of them to cover, I'm not saying he was called Simon when he was sinful and Peter when he was obedient by the Bible writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  But by Jesus...Jesus used those words to make those identifications.  There are times when the Bible writer say Matthew, for example, calls him Peter in Matthew 16 when Jesus calls him Satan.  Mark calls him Peter again when Jesus calls him Satan. So what Mark calls him, what Matthew calls him, what Luke calls him, what John calls him is not consistent with that pattern.  But when Jesus spoke to him and called him Simon, there was a sin issue, and called him Peter, there was a time of obedience or a process of obedience.  And so, Jesus is moving him to become what his name implies, a rock.

     Now Peter, according to Matthew chapter 10, was the leader, the protos, the chief one.  Every group has to have a leader.  Remember I told you there were three groups of four disciples...group one, group two, and group three and all four lists are always the same.  And each has its own leader.  But the leader at the top, the first name all the time is Peter because the group of Twelve had to have a leader and their leader was this man Peter.  He is the main preacher, really the only preacher among the Apostles in the first twelve chapters.  He is the one who proclaims and preaches.  His sermons are recorded in the first twelve chapters of Acts.  He is the great preacher among the Apostles.  He was the dominating one, the leader.

     So, the Lord took this man, vacillating, brash, bold, impulsive, self-confident, at the same time weak, and He shaped him into this great leader.  This was the Lord's task, this was His goal...take a common man, make him the great foundation of the church, the great apostolic leader of the church.  This is incredible work of transformation.  And in looking at Peter, because he's the leader among the Twelve, we find out how God makes a leader...how God builds a leader.  This is very, very insightful material in Scripture on him.  This is how God builds a leader.

     The last time I told you there were three necessary components, or elements, or features within a leader.  One is the right raw material.  Remember that?  Two, the right experience.  And three, the right character or virtue.  I believe leaders are born.  I don't think you can take somebody and make them into a leader, unless they have the right raw material.  I think the Lord has to weave that in the fabric of their being, that's genetic stuff.  Leaders are born, to a degree.  But after having been born with the material, they have to be shaped and what shapes them is essentially two things.  One is experience, experience.  And two is character development.  And they go together, we'll show you that.

     Last time we looked at the raw material.  Long before Peter was ever born, way back in the councils of eternity, God had determined that the whole redemptive plan was going to come to pass, that the Lord would come to earth and be incarnate, that He would have Apostles, their names were well-known to God, they were written down.  And Peter was planned into the program.  And so whatever genetics had to be done to get Peter the raw material, it was there.  Peter had all that leadership raw material.  And I said essentially it boils down to three things, inquisitiveness, initiative and involvement.  Leaders are inquisitive. They have an immense curiosity because leaders, if you want another definition of a leader, a leader is a problem solver.  Leaders solve problems and the way you solve problems is with further information.  And so, leaders are marked by inquisitiveness, curiosity.

     Secondly, they have initiative.  Not just curious, not just solving problems, but they take the initiative in leading the surge, or leading the thrust into the next great adventure.

     They also have involvement.  They don't lead from a distance.  They aren't in the back, they're in the front.  They live their lives in a cloud of dust.  That was Peter...inquisitive, initiating constantly, and we see that all through the New Testament, as we pointed out last time, and very, very involved.  And therein is the right raw material.  When you look for a leader, that's what you look for, somebody who is involved, somebody who is inquisitive, and somebody who has initiative, who comes and says...this is the problem, I think I've figured out how to solve it, this is what I'm going to do.

     I've said this for years.  I don't need people in leadership positions who come and say, "I think we have a problem."  I need somebody to come and say, "We had a problem, this is how I solved it."  That's leadership.  And you get involv