Gill concluded the family service by looking at how we use the phrase that someone is a rock to mean someone who is dependable and can be relied on. There were many aspects of Peter’s life which indicated his reliability and dependability. His confession of Jesus as the Messiah (Matt 16:18) shows someone whose life was being shaped by the knowledge of who Jesus is – a vital principle for us to emulate. When he walked on water (Matt 14:22-31), there was a sense that he had grasped the truly revolutionary principle that he could do what Jesus could do (see also John 14:12), again something we need to learn (all things are possible with God!) When Jesus washed His disciples’ feet, Peter’s rejection of this initially showed that he had a deep sense of the holiness of God and wanted to honour Jesus in everything. All of these things indicate a man who had a real hunger for God and a faith that was large and expansive.
At the same time, Peter shows us that he is human and all too prone to make mistakes. When he walked on water, he soon took his eyes off Jesus and began to doubt (and thus sink.) We too can be like this: full of faith one minute, besieged by doubts and fears the next. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he must have felt deflated by his inability to pray for even one hour in Jesus’s time of need, and in his denial three times, he let Jesus down and felt so useless and helpless from this denial that he returned to his old life of fishing, probably feeling too disheartened to believe God could continue to use him.
Jesus knew Peter through and through. He knew his volatility and failures, but he also saw his potential. He knew what Peter could become: the man who would oversee the appointment of another disciple to take the place of Judas (Acts 1:15-26), the man who, on the Day of Pentecost, could stand up and preach to thousands (Acts 2:14-41), the man who could speak out boldly to see a man healed at the temple gates (Acts 3:4-26), the man who could face the authorities and say, ‘We must obey God rather than men!’ (Acts 5:29) Jesus knows us through and through too and sees not only our failures and mistakes but our potential. We too are needed and have purpose and mission in His church.
