How you respond to Jesus depends entirely on whether you’ve truly grasped who He is—and in John 6, as Jesus walks across the sea to His disciples in the dark, He makes that question impossible to dodge.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The preacher emphasizes that we need to know who we’re responding to before we can respond correctly. What does it look like in your own life when you confess Jesus is Lord with your words but don’t act like it’s true? What gap exists between your confession and your actions?
Peter got out of the boat and walked toward Jesus on the water, even though he was afraid and eventually began to sink. The preacher says this is not a failure but an example of responding to Jesus despite doubt. How does this change the way you think about taking steps of faith when you’re uncertain?
The sermon contrasts Peter’s response with King Herod’s response to the news of Jesus’ birth—both saw miraculous signs, but one moved toward Jesus and one moved away. What keeps you from moving toward Jesus in certain areas of your life, and how is that similar to or different from Herod’s resistance?
The preacher uses the illustration of a meal prepared in front of you (comparing it to the “open kitchen” concept) to say that Jesus “shows us exactly what He’s doing” and we can see if it’s prepared correctly. What does it mean practically to examine Jesus’ life and message this way? What parts of His life or teaching seem most visible to you, and what parts are you still trying to understand?
The sermon suggests we often hold back from acting on our faith because we’re afraid we’ll “get it wrong” or mess up. How has fear of imperfection or failure kept you from responding to what you believe God is calling you to do? What would change if you believed that God could “make beautiful” even your broken, messed-up attempts?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
So last week we talked about the need to respond to Jesus, the need to actually react as He comes. But I think most of us would agree there are a lot of different ways we can react to all sorts of circumstances. And the question is, how am I going to respond to this circumstance? How am I going to respond to the idea that the God of all the universe came into the world?
The key thing there that I just said, because if I say it that way it seems obvious, well, I should respond however He wants me to respond. He’s the God of the whole universe that came into the world. But first, we have to reach the point where we understand that’s who He is. And too often, I’d say in our society, people in general don’t understand that, but too often even as Christians, even though we confess that, we don’t act like it’s true.
And so as we think about the Christmas stories, we prepare our hearts for Christmas, it’s so, so important that we actually focus our hearts on whom it is that we’re responding to. Because we can’t respond correctly to Him until we truly absorb and hold on to whom it is that we’re responding to. So tonight that’s what we’re going to think about, and as we prepare to do that, let’s go ahead and come before our God in prayer and ask that He would help us.
Lord, we come before You as those who are weak and weary, those who are broken, those who are uncertain, those who are unfaithful. Lord, help us. Help us to be faithful. Help us to feel Your certainty. Help us to feel Your peace. Help us to be directed by You. As You help us, Lord, would You help us to help others as well, that by the way that we live, by the way that we speak, by the way that we love, that we would show whom it is that we serve, and others would want to know You. And we pray this in the precious name of our Savior, Jesus, amen.
So if anyone here—I should preface this before I start to impress you and you think, wow, Tim knows all about that—I don’t. I am almost useless if a car has a problem. I have no skill as a mechanic, but I have always been interested in the car industry. I’m interested in different models of cars and different approaches to design and all that sort of stuff—the history of the automobile industry, that kind of thing.
And I’m also a geek. And so you bring those two together, and these last few years reading about cars I cannot even begin to afford, like the various Teslas, it’s very interesting. Not from a perspective—we’re going to be talking later on during Sunday School Express about coveting—I’m not speaking in terms of coveting. I’m just intrigued by the whole thing. I’m intrigued by how it works.
And so, for example, I have no need for a pickup truck, generally speaking, but I was very interested when Tesla a few years ago announced they were going to come out with the Cybertruck. Has anyone seen the Cybertruck? A few of you have, yes. And so if you have, I should have put a picture up of it. I didn’t want to get in trouble for copyright or something.
But if you’ve seen the Cybertruck, you know it is a genuinely bizarre-looking vehicle. I kind of like it. Some people really hate it. It looks like it came out of some kind of early ‘90s, very early 3D video game where it’s very blocky and all these angles and so on. It looks nothing like a normal pickup truck, but it was announced it was going to be a certain price. It was remarkably low for what it was, and it could race like a race car and all this sort of stuff. So lots of interest around it, lots of interest in general around Tesla and anything Elon Musk does and so on.
So lots and lots of hype, and then it kept getting delayed, like if you follow Tesla, happens with all their cars. Anyway, so it gets delayed and gets delayed, and then finally a few weeks ago, someone outside of Tesla took possession of a Cybertruck. However, it looked different than any Cybertruck that you’d seen. It had a brown color to it. In fact, it had wood grain to it. In fact, it wasn’t built by Tesla at all. It was an enthusiast who happened to be an amazing woodworker who built a wooden Cybertruck, drivable.
Now that guy’s pretty amazing. And it went viral, and his goal was to hear from Elon Musk and actually to give this wooden Cybertruck to Musk. He’s a big fan of the company, and he wanted to do this, I think in Vietnam. Anyway, so he built it, went viral. He actually got the response from Elon Musk. I haven’t heard the rest of the story yet, but here’s the thing.
I said a Cybertruck was delivered several weeks ago. Someone had it that wasn’t in Tesla, but it wasn’t the Cybertruck. In fact, it was just this past week that they delivered the first real Cybertrucks. And so it was really interesting and exciting, but the response to that wooden one was to be in awe of this wood maker, this wood craftsman that had built this thing, I mean, incredible.
Different response than if you were actually talking about the one coming from the company. Because you weren’t waiting for automobile reviewers to get a hold of the wooden Cybertruck and talk about its handling. You weren’t looking to hear about how many miles it could go, or maybe you were, but not in the sense of, I wonder if this is the truck that I should buy, because it isn’t the truck that you’re ever going to buy. The response is different.
We need to know what Cybertruck we’re talking about to understand how to react to that. And that happens all kinds of times in our lives. A few months ago, I needed a new coffee maker. Found a good deal, it sounded really good, ordered the coffee maker, it arrived, it’s missing the features that made me respond to it favorably. And I look very closely, and I’d switched retailers trying to find a better deal, and there was one digit off in the model number. Different model.
It looked the same, had the same name on the box. For all intents and purposes, you thought you were getting that coffee maker until you opened up and realized that the buttons weren’t there that you were expecting. So we need to know what we’re responding to.
There were a lot of people that claimed to be a messiah. There were a lot of people that came and said, I am going to make things work for the people of God. There were a lot of people that claimed it. There was only one who really was. There were a lot of people that claimed to be a prophet speaking for God. Some of them, in fact, were genuine prophets speaking for God. But how we react to prophets speaking for God and the prophet who is also actually God is dramatically different.
We need to know if we’re looking at the wooden Cybertruck or the actual Cybertruck. Who is Jesus? Well, thankfully, Jesus shows exactly who He is, and He shows Himself over and over again in the gospels. And for example, we’ve been working through John 6. We started last week. We’re going to verse 16 tonight. And as we see that, we see Jesus revealing exactly who He is, who came into this world.
Take a look. It says, “When evening came, His disciples went down to the sea and got into a boat and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were frightened. But He said to them, ‘It is I, do not be afraid.’ Then they were glad to take Him into the boat, and immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going.”
Now, I have never actually piloted a boat. I’ve never been a boat’s captain, even a small little motorboat or anything. The closest I can claim is when I was a kid, I rode on a Duck in Branson, one of those boats that also can drive around, and the commercially licensed pilot of the ship let me sit in the captain’s chair and kind of steer it for a moment when there was absolutely nothing out in the way. So that’s the extent of knowledge I have.
But one thing I do know is that if you are out in your boat, you generally don’t have people come and help you out to get someplace by walking across the water. Not the way it normally happens, right? I do know that. I think all of us know that. That’s not how it usually happens.
And if you need someone to come to you while you’re out, they’re going to come in another boat. Maybe if it’s good water and it’s not so far, maybe they’ll swim out to you. But they’re not going to walk out to you. That’s just not how you’d normally do it because of why?
Why don’t people usually walk out to boats? They can’t, right? The water’s too deep. Yeah. I mean, I can help someone start walking towards a boat. I can give them some lead boots and they can start walking that way, but they’re going to be underwater and they’re going to drown. The boat’s going to be way up there. Even if they had scuba gear on, it’s not going to work. So that’s not how things normally go.
But Jesus walks to them. And so the first thing that we see here is that Jesus, yes, He’s coming to join His disciples. Yes, He’s coming to help them. Yes, all that. But what’s He doing in that? Jesus is coming in a way that demonstrates very, very clearly, I’m not just another person. I’m not just another person.
Now tomorrow night we’re going to think about how clearly Jesus is a person. But tonight we’re thinking about that Jesus isn’t just a person. Because how many people—we’ve all heard this, I think—people say, “Well, Jesus, He was a great man, great teacher.” Was He a great man? Yes. Was He a great teacher? Yes. Is that where we end? No.
And the disciples could see that clearly. And we can see as we go on here in the next few minutes, their reaction to Jesus. And as they react to Jesus, they react to Him understanding very clearly they’re not just encountering a normal guy coming out to visit them on a boat. There’s something very, very remarkable here. He’s showing His power over all things.
In several different occasions in the Gospels, we see Jesus use opportunities where they’re in a boat to demonstrate how He has power—power over the water itself, power over the winds. He has all power. And so it is when we think about, for example, Rob read our Advent wreath lighting reading tonight, and you think about this declaration to this humble little town of Bethlehem that the Messiah would come out of it.
We think about the context in which Jesus was born—very humble. I mean, most of us, if not all of us, were not born in such humble circumstances. It’s a humble—He didn’t need to just show His power to show His power. But make no mistake, He was powerful, and that’s the key thing we see here over and over again. This is who Jesus is—the one who is so powerful, He doesn’t need to shout that He’s powerful. He simply does. It’s clear.
And we see that contrast even at His birth. This is not something that comes just later in life when He’s with the disciples. This is clear from the beginning.
Because here’s this little baby born of Mary who is of no account to society. Stepdad, or people might think Joseph is His dad, He’s not, but people are trying to sort out this couple here. Neither of them look like they’re important. There’s no reason to think much of it other than that this baby has been born in a very unfortunate moment when there’s no room in the inn, they’re in a manger. But who would even know that? Except that in the midst of that humble beginning, what do we have?
We have the very angel army of heaven proclaiming it. Luke chapter 2, verse 9: “An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was a great multitude, an angel, with the angel, a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,” and it cuts off there on our reading, but glory to God, I’ll just fill that in—Glory to God in the highest.
Think about that. Did that happen for any of you when you were born? No. And if you said yes, I was going to make a call to the county medical, mental health services and get you the help that you need, because if you thought that happened when you were born, it didn’t. But here it was.
Here it was. Jesus didn’t need to have just this palace appear out of nowhere. And Mary and Joseph, they’re there, and it’s time for Mary to have the baby, and this palace just materializes, and there’s this golden cradle there, and there’s a light—they don’t have electricity yet, but there’s a light that just shines down right on that cradle, and angels are singing beautiful lullabies to the baby. He didn’t need to do that.
Humble means—where does the glory of God show up? The glory of God shows up to point people to Him so that they don’t miss it. But when they actually encounter Him, He doesn’t need to show off.
That’s not the point. That’s the remarkable thing here. We have one who comes who doesn’t need to show off, doesn’t need a great pretentious demonstration of His power, and yet the glory of God is shown in plain sight so no one can mistake what’s happening either. That’s the one whom we encounter: one who is very much a human being experiencing the indignities of a fallen human world and yet with that glory pointing to Him so no one misses it if they’re willing to see it.
It reminds me of the old slogan for Steak and Shake. Remember the slogan? Incite, it must be right. Oh yeah, that one too, that was a good one. After you saw it prepared in incite, then you took homosac, right? But incite, it must be right.
And incite, it must be right was referring to the fact that Steak and Shake, long before it was the trendy thing, had an open dining concept. You walked in there and you could see the grill out there. You could sit at the little bar if you wanted and order your burger or a whole sack of food so you could take home a sack, and you could see them preparing it.
And the idea was if you can see it, it’s going to be done right. Incite, it must be right.
Now there are certainly restaurants now that make a point of this, not for the sake of demonstrating that it’s done rightly, but for the show of it. Go to some places, they’ll do this big demonstrative preparation of food right in front of you. And typically they’re not preparing everything in front of you; they bring it partially prepared so they can put on a show for you. And so you don’t really know what happens before they bring it out.
But the idea was that they were going to prepare this in front of you. Maybe you go to a little diner, they prepare it in front of you, and in theory that should make sure everything’s right, and you certainly know if it isn’t.
I remember years ago going to a little diner. I won’t mention the name of the chain that owned this diner because maybe they normally don’t do this. But I was watching and they were taking raw eggs and they’d hit them with the spatula, and then they were immediately going over and taking the eggs that were done and flipping them onto plates.
And they were taking raw bacon and they’d shovel that on with the spatula and then immediately go over and take the cooked meat off and put it on someone’s plate. They weren’t worrying at all about cross-contamination. You could see it clearly. The meat, the spatula was not getting hot enough to be sanitized at any point in there.
And I remember I did not eat my breakfast meat that was on that plate because I had just watched them take the raw bacon, switch to the cooked bacon, and put it on my plate. And I’ve had enough food poisoning from pork. I knew I didn’t need that bacon that badly. So I could see it wasn’t right.
Jesus does life in front of us, so to speak. He did it in front of the disciples. He allowed them into His life. He allowed them to see what He was doing. He allowed the world to see what He was doing. God didn’t do this mysterious salvation far off on another planet, “Oh, let me just tell you about what happened there.”
No. Jesus came into this world as a human being, lived with human beings, so you could see exactly what He was doing. And we could say, okay, now what do I do with this? Didn’t need to be grand. It wasn’t about the show of it. Jesus didn’t do miracles just to impress people.
The Pharisees at times, the other religious leaders, what did they want? They wanted to see a show. “Hey, why don’t you just do something for us, Jesus? Show off so that people know who you are.”
What did Satan ask Jesus to do? “Hey, why don’t you do one of those impressive miracles? It’ll show you that your heavenly Father really loves you, and everyone’s going to love you after that.” But Jesus wouldn’t do it.
Jesus wouldn’t bite, because He wasn’t trying to do an exposition. He wasn’t just doing an open concept to do an open concept. What was He doing? He was living in this world so that He would experience what we experience, so that when we come to Him, we know He actually understands.
And He was living in such a way that those who are willing to actually ask the question who came down could look and could see. He did miracles to demonstrate His power—not to show off, so that we would know, to authenticate His message, not to show off, so that we would know.
And so what really matters, if we just read the Gospels, if anyone is willing to genuinely read these accounts of who Jesus is, what we’re challenged to say is, you can see the preparation right in front of you. You can tell if it was prepared correctly or not. You can tell if His message fits or not. Now what are you going to do with it? Are you going to accept it? Are you going to take hold of it or not?
C.S. Lewis, years ago, pointed out the one thing that makes absolutely no sense at all is to say, “Well, He was a great teacher.” Because Jesus taught what we’re speaking of now—that He was the one who had come from the Father, that He was the one who would sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, that He was the one that had power over life and death and judgment. Either He was much more than a great teacher, or He wasn’t a great teacher at all.
We can look at the preparation. It’s right there in front of us. What are we going to do with it?
Sometimes it’s not so good to see what’s really going on, right? We get some exposé: here’s the real behind-the-scenes look at somebody, and we realize, you know, I wish I didn’t know that. I don’t want to know that about that person. I kind of wish I could just rewind and never have heard it, because it doesn’t do anything good for me to hear; it certainly lowers my opinion of that person.
Jesus put 12 disciples right around Him and said, “Live with Me, be eyewitnesses to exactly who I am. I want you to be able to go and say exactly who I am.” Why? Because He had nothing to hide. He was saving us in plain sight.
So when we talk about Jesus being born into the world, when we sing all those Christmas songs and we celebrate on Christmas Day, we are celebrating the one who, the whole work of salvation was being done right in front of us for us and everyone who ever lives to see. And then the question becomes, what are you going to do with it?
If you see that meal prepared properly right in front of you, you have a choice. You can say, “Well, I don’t think it was really properly prepared, I don’t think I’m going to eat it.” Or you can say, “No, clearly the evidence points to that it was properly prepared. I’m going to take that plate and I’m going to eat it.”
Too often with Jesus, we say, “Well, I don’t know, let me tweak it a little bit.” Even though we have a five-star chef who has the perfect seasoning on everything, we start dumping stuff on it. This perfectly marinated piece of meat—I’m going to make Jim cringe now; he just gave us some wonderfully delicious smoked meat last week. You get that meat and you immediately just start slopping stuff on it. Let me just pour a bunch of mustard and ketchup on it, and then I’ll take a bunch of—let’s just get—I have some Cajun seasoning here, I’ll just dump that on it too.
And you’re just ruining it, right? And that’s what people do, that’s what we often do with Jesus. We see the parts that we’re not quite sure what to do with but clearly fit together into the overall picture of who He is. We say, “Well, I think I’d like it better if I just cover that up with some ketchup, cover that with some mustard.”
And Jesus is saying, “I’m the master chef, I made everything. I know exactly how the spices come together because I made all the spices. Take it and eat.”
Are we going to take it and eat, or are we going to just turn our noses up at it? What are we going to do with the one that we encounter? And the key thing is He calls us all to trust in Him.
Take a look at Matthew 14, verse 28. It says, “And Peter answered Him, ‘Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.’”
Peter sees Jesus walking out in the water, and that is what Peter says. Jesus, it says, He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me.”
Jesus immediately reached out His hand and took hold of him, saying to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”
Was Peter successful? Well, no, he started to sink.
But let’s stop there for a moment because here’s the place where I think I sometimes go wrong when I read this. I think, Peter, if only you were with Jesus, you’ve seen all the food prepared, you knew you didn’t need to grab the bottle of ketchup, you knew He was in control, why didn’t you just keep walking?
Why did you have to be like one of those animated characters that looks down and falls because they see that they’re walking in air? You were walking on water because Jesus said you could walk on water. Just keep walking.
Have you ever thought about the other 11? Peter gets out of the boat. Peter says, “Jesus, I see You out there. I want to come out there with You.”
I don’t think oftentimes we hold on enough to the fact that in that moment, Peter realizes that as he’s seeing Jesus’ power, he should act, and in seeing what Jesus is doing, he should respond. And so Peter doesn’t get it all right. Peter’s faith wavers, my faith wavers, your faith is going to waver. But what does Peter do? Peter starts walking towards Jesus.
And while Jesus says to Peter that he shouldn’t have doubted, He doesn’t tell Peter that he was wrong for trying. And sometimes I think that’s where we get stuck. And that’s where we get stuck today, not just with Peter, but with ourselves. We think, well, I’m not sure if I get out of the boat, I’m not sure if I go where Jesus calls me that I’m actually going to be able to keep walking. I might sink. I might not have enough faith to get all the way there.
And in that, what is God saying to us? Try. It’s not about your strength. It’s not about you getting everything right. That’s not what being a Christian is. It’s not about I have everything down, and whenever I set my mind to doing what God’s called me to do, I do it.
Too often, because we can’t know that we’re going to get there, where we stop is, I just won’t get out of the boat at all. I won’t go walk towards Jesus at all.
All of you here tonight have gotten out of the boat at some point. Being here at this little church plant, I believe, is an example of getting out of the boat, because you know what’s true about being here in this little church plant?
We’re small. We have a tiny budget that hangs by a thread. God’s blessed us, but it’s not very big, and it doesn’t guarantee everything is nice and smooth and so on. We have a tiny building that—I love our little space here—it has a lot of wonderful memories, but it’s not anything fancy. We don’t have a huge staff that can cater to every need. We don’t have a huge set of services and events and programs that cover every day of the week.
It can be kind of scary to say, “Okay, this is where I’m going to call home.”
I can tell you a lot of really good churches where you don’t need to worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow, because they have a wonderful, godly staff, and they are wonderfully established and so on. And yet you are here, and that’s not anything against anyone who’s somewhere else, because it depends where God’s calling us.
But in choosing to come and be a part of the mess and the tangle and the uncertainty of, “Let’s go and establish this, let’s see what God’s doing right here in this new thing,” this scary thing, this wild thing, this all-consuming thing that we’re in together—it takes trusting God.
Now, can I confess something on that? There have been an awful lot of times, and there still are an awful lot of times that I start thinking about that, and I think, whoa. What happens if? What do I do if? And I start to think, maybe you’ve had that experience too.
But Little Hills isn’t going to be here because I have perfect faith. Little Hills isn’t going to be here because any of us, or all of us, have perfect faith. Little Hills is going to be here because God has called Little Hills to be here.
That’s the reason. The only reason. Sometimes we just need to get out, and we need to respond to what Jesus is doing, see His power, see Him placing us someplace, respond, even when, in this particular moment, we’re still struggling. And we know that we’re going to start losing faith and start to think.
Because it’s not about our faithfulness. Think about what we talked about on Friday night about Mary and Joseph. They both had confrontations with what are they going to do with the power of God coming before them, interceding into their lives in very, very clear, life-altering ways.
Jesus coming into what seemed like an otherwise probably pretty straightforward life required some trust. As we go on and we read the rest of the Gospels, we don’t see a lot more on Joseph. We see a little. We see when Jesus is in the temple and He’s showing the teachers of the law how much He knows, they don’t assume that’s where He is. They forget and just see Him as their little boy for the moment.
You see other examples where Mary doesn’t have everything quite down. We don’t hear any more about Joseph, but presumably there were lots of times like that. There were lots of times they were thinking that, yes, they could remember back to the angel and what the angel said, but still, as you’re walking towards where the angels called you, you start to think and you think, is this really working?
I talked a few weeks ago about John the Baptist and him basically saying the same thing: is this really working? You start to think.
But it’s okay to mess up. It’s okay to do that. What we need to do is actually respond and allow God to use us. We need to respond and go do.
Jeff Landis and I were talking the other day about squirrels. Now, I know some people hate squirrels. Some people love squirrels. There can be no doubt squirrels are a bit nutty. But one thing: you look at a squirrel, and imagine you’re driving down the road. You see a squirrel going across the road.
I can tell you exactly what that squirrel is going to do. Can you? What’s the squirrel going to do as you’re driving down the road? It’s going to stop there. He’s going to stop there right in front of you.
So if you don’t slow down, what are you going to do? Well, you’re going to run into that squirrel. You think, little squirrel, if I could give you a lesson about etiquette about crossing roads, you need to look both ways. And then once you do, you need to commit to getting across the thing.
And if you realize that you were a little too ambitious, turn around. But what you shouldn’t do is just stay right in the middle of the road and just get hit by the car. But what do they do? Well, they sit there in the middle of the road, and I slam on my brakes after I make sure no one’s going to rear-end me, and hopefully everything works out okay.
We are squirrels.
So often we hear God call us, and we get out there into the middle of the road, and we just stop. And we think, I don’t know if I have the courage to cross the road. I don’t know if I have the courage to do what I need to do next. And so we just stop there, and we just wait for the car to hit us. And God’s saying, come on, come on, cross the road.
And I’m guilty of this. I’m guilty of this a lot. We don’t want to get stuck on the road. But the first way you stop getting stuck on the road is you start moving. And Peter maybe wasn’t moving fast. Peter maybe didn’t have everything right. Peter was going to mess up a whole bunch more, and there were lots of times when Peter actually did act that he put his foot in his mouth by doing so.
But one thing we can say about Peter is that Peter was convinced that Jesus’ very existence in his life was a call to action, and he wanted to respond. As Christians, that’s what God’s calling us to too. It’s not about getting everything right.
We have that wonderful hymn, Come Ye Sinners, and it says, if you wait until… I’m going to mess up the line here—I don’t have it in front of me—but if you wait until you’re right, you will never come, or something along those lines. And that always strikes me.
We wait until we’re ready. If we wait until God is going to approve of us, we will never come before Him. We wait until God has fully equipped us before we go and serve, we will never serve. God calls us to start moving, and there are going to be false starts, and there are going to be mistakes, and we’re going to mess things up, but God calls us to move and turn towards Him. We shouldn’t get stuck.
Now here’s the other thing, though, and this is where it’s a crucial difference in Peter’s life compared to some of the others we encounter. The crucial thing is Peter encountered the living God. He encountered Jesus, and as he encountered Jesus, he began and at some point fully grasped around whom it was that came down.
And so, yes, he acted. But more importantly, as he acted, he acted as one who understood who Jesus was, and so even when he doubted, even when he struggled, he was moving towards the living God. He wasn’t just moving towards anyone.
That’s very different, for example, from what we see in King Herod. Again, Rob and Jim were talking about this challenging us, and what do we read in Matthew chapter 2, verse 16? “And Herod, when he saw that he had become tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.”
Herod hears the prophecy, he sees the miraculous things happening, but he doesn’t grasp on to whom it is that’s coming to the world, or at least he doesn’t want to. And so often those two actually go together, because a lot of times it’s not that we can’t grasp on to whom it is, it’s that we don’t want to grasp on to whom it is.
And Herod says, “This doesn’t sound good for my political career.” And so what does he do? He just starts murdering young boys so that maybe, just maybe, he can kill the Son of God. Maybe he can kill the Messiah.
So he does something, but he does the wrong thing. A very, very wrong thing, clearly.
What do the wise men do, though? They hear the same things, they see the same things, and they go charging towards Jesus, and they go, and they give Him the gifts, and they worship Him, and they celebrate.
Who is it that came down, and how are we encountering Him? That’s the key. That’s what we see with the disciples as they encounter Jesus as He walks on water.
What do we read in Matthew—let’s see, this is, that should have been Matthew 16 instead, so I’m just going to flip there. Over the screen, Matthew 16, verse 13. Actually, that’s not right either. Well, yeah, we’ll just paraphrase here. I apologize.
What do they say when they encounter Jesus? Actually, there it is, Matthew 16:16. As Peter encounters Jesus, what do they say? “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
As they’ve witnessed Jesus, as they’ve seen Him, seen the miracles He’s doing, this comes right after they’ve seen several of those miracles. What does Peter do? He confesses who Jesus is.
And that’s the key thing. Herod doesn’t confess who Jesus is. Peter does. They both make some mistakes, but what reins Peter in, in his impulses? He knows who Jesus is. He wants to do what’s right before Jesus, even when he messes up.
And here’s that challenge for us tonight, friends. Here’s what we need to do.
If you’re on the fence and you’re thinking, should I be a Christian? Shouldn’t I be a Christian? Maybe you’re scrolling down Facebook tonight and you popped onto our live stream and you’re thinking, I thought I should listen to a sermon because it’s Christmastime and it always makes me feel good to hear this, but I really don’t know about any of this stuff. I don’t know what to do, and I certainly don’t think I’m ready because I’m not going to get everything right.
And I know if I—you’re going to call me to pray a prayer—and if I pray that prayer tonight, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go and I’m going to mess up tomorrow and God’s not going to want me, maybe someday.
Maybe you believe in Jesus, but you hold off on actually doing anything with it because you think if I actually do anything with it, I’m just going to put my foot in my mouth and people are going to look down on me, they’re going to look down on Jesus, I’ll just hold back.
But here are the two things that we see in the life of Peter as he encounters the one who came down at Christmas, as he encounters the one who was born in a manger. What does Peter do? Peter confesses who He is, and then he acts.
That’s what we’re called to do too—to wrestle with who Jesus is, and then it’s as simple as that, to proclaim that Jesus is Lord. That’s the truth of Christmas: that the Lord of the universe came into this world.
And then to understand that’s what it is to be a Christian, that’s where the ground of everything is—we confess who Jesus is. That’s what really matters, friends.
And then we go and act, but we go and act because we know that Jesus is Lord. We know He’s the one that’s sovereign over everything. We know He’s the only hope that we have to accomplish anything. And so whatever we do, we know the trust is ultimately trusting in Him to take our humble, broken, messed-up attempts and make them into something beautiful.
He’s the one that’s prepared everything in plain sight. So then when we go and we prepare stuff before God and we mess it up, God can actually go and fix it. God does go and fix it.
So we can act, not because we have everything right, and not that we should not care about getting things right, but because we know that we serve a God who makes everything right.
At Christmas, that Lord of all came into the world, came into the world, and He offers us that salvation that we too can confess like Peter did, and we can act, and we can act and we can mess up like Peter, but when we do, He’ll pick us back up and He’ll be with us still.
Let’s pray.
Lord, wherever we come tonight, whatever we’re struggling with, whatever we’re trying to do and not getting right, whatever we’re just broken and weary and tired and stressed and uncertain and everything else about, Lord, would You take all those things and would You remind us that You are the one who is in control?
Lord Jesus, as we read these words from the Gospels, as we read about Your birth, as we read about Your ministry, would You remind us that You are the one who makes everything right, not us, and because of that, as we turn to You, we can move with confidence, not that we get everything right, but that You have.
We pray this in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.
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