Serving in His Stead

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Well, I officiated my first wedding ceremony the day after I turned 19. It was a long time ago. As a matter of fact, I think I had to take the day off of work and told my supervisor I was going to go marry my grandmother.

That got some fun looks. So I might need to clarify what I meant there. There was a man named John Blakely who proposed to my grandmother, and they asked me to perform the ceremony.

My grandfather passed away when I was about six years old. and about 12 years later John and my nanny decided they liked each other and they were going to get married and we very quickly welcomed him into the family he was a wonderful man and he never did try to take the place of my grandfather but we loved him as a grandfather we called him Papa John after the pizza place but we loved him and I think he loved being part of our family because he didn’t have any grandchildren, and suddenly he inherited four grandchildren and two daughters and a bunch of dogs. I don’t think any of them.

Maybe a great grandchild. It’s hard to remember the timeline, but he inherited all this, and we just loved having him around. Well, John had this interesting habit that I picked up on.

When we would be on the telephone, he would never, ever say goodbye. He’d always say, and he’d lived in Oklahoma City most of his life, but he was still just kind of a country guy from Fort Cobb, and he’d say, well, we’ll talk at you later. that’s that’s how he would end every phone call well after they’d been married for five years john suddenly one day developed a brain aneurysm john went into a coma and was in that coma for a few months and eventually passed away and I had the privilege of preaching papa john’s funeral and I know for a fact that the last words he ever said to me were we’ll talk at you later and so I brought that up at his funeral. As I was preaching the message, I said, you know, for believers, and he was a believer in Jesus Christ, for Christians, death is not goodbye, it’s just we’ll talk at you later.

And those final words that he said to me have stuck with me since then. You know, a lot of times, somebody’s final words will stick with us. A lot of times, especially if they know the end is coming and they have a little time to think about it, somebody’s final words usually have a great impact on what we remember about them.

They summarize somebody’s life. And this morning, I want to begin a series of messages that I’m going to be sharing with you the next few weeks about final words. I realize this probably sounds at first glance like a strange place to start with a new ministry.

It sounds like what I should have preached at the church I just left, final words. But again, final words. For the one that spoke the final words, the work is ending.

But for the ones hearing the final words, the work is just beginning. And that’s really where I want to go with this. Over the next few weeks, I want to look at some of the final words that Jesus gave to his followers between the time of the resurrection and the ascension, because those final words that he shared with us form the basis for the beginning of our work.

They really are the beginning of what we’re supposed to do. And so I want to take a few weeks to look at some of these. We won’t cover everything that Jesus said during those 40 days.

But we’re going to look at a few important instances. And if you would, I’d invite you this morning to turn with me to John chapter 21. John chapter 21.

And if you’re able to without too much difficulty, would you stand with me as we read from God’s Word together? John chapter 21. We’re going to start in verse 15 and go through verse 17.

This is on the banks of the Sea of Galilee in one of Jesus’ appearances after the resurrection. And it says, starting in verse 15, So when they had eaten breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me more than these? He said to him, yes, Lord, you know that I love you.

He said to him, feed my lambs. He said to him again a second time, Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me? He said to him, yes, Lord, you know that I love you.

He said, tend my sheep. He said to him the third time, Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, do you love me?

And he said to him, Lord, you know all things. You know that I love you. Jesus said to him, feed my sheep.

You may be seated. Now to understand what Jesus was doing here, we need to make sure we have a little bit of background on the story. Peter, right before the Jesus arrest and crucifixion, He had boasted about the strength of his commitment to Jesus.

He had essentially told Jesus, I love you more than all the rest of these people. I don’t know what these other disciples are doing, but I love you more than they do. He had said, in Mark chapter 14, even if all are made to stumble, yet I will not be.

He said, even if everybody else falls away, even if everybody else deserts you, Lord, I won’t. I’m going to stick with you because I love you the most. He said a couple of verses later, if I have to die with you, I will not deny you. That was the strength of Peter’s commitment as far as he told Jesus.

That no matter what happened, he loved Jesus so much that he was going to stay with Jesus no matter what happened. And if you know the rest of the story, that’s not what happened. If you know the rest of the story, Jesus looked at him as he was boasting and said, before the rooster crows twice, you were going to deny me three times.

And he did. And he did it pretty forcefully, pretty emphatically. The scriptures record that he had been cursed.

I do not know the man. And so now he had denied Jesus. Jesus had risen again.

Jesus knew that he had denied him three times. But as far as we have any record of in the Gospels, Jesus, after the time of the resurrection, has never said a word to him about the denials. Isn’t that terrible when you’ve done something and mama or daddy know and you know they know, but they haven’t said anything and you’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop?

Anybody else ever experienced that terror as a child? So I think Peter during this time is just waiting for Jesus to say something. And he would probably even feel better if Jesus would just come out and get on to him.

Peter had to have been wondering during this time where he stood with Jesus. He’s probably thinking, I blew it. I’ve messed up.

Does Jesus still want anything to do with me? Do I still have a place in his service? Can I still serve him?

And Jesus’ answer became clear when he showed up that day on the sea of Galilee and spoke to the disciples. And in particular in this story, this is right after he had told them, cast out the nets, pull in the fish. Some of you will be familiar with that story.

After that, they come and sit together and eat breakfast. And where we picked up in verse 15, it said, when they had eaten breakfast. So we see in this story that Jesus has sat down and eaten breakfast with Peter. Now that right there is a mark of intimate fellowship. You know, there are some people you just don’t want to go to lunch with, right?

Think of your worst enemy. None of you have enemies, right? Think of your worst enemy.

Do you really want to go sit down and have breakfast with them? Probably not. Especially in that day, it was a mark of fellowship that you were going to sit down and enjoy a meal together.

Jesus sat down and had breakfast with Peter and with the others. And he even called Peter by his name. Three times he calls him Simon.

Not Peter, which had become his celebrity name that we know him by. His name in ministry. Jesus is talking to Simon that he met there three years ago by the boats.

Simon, son of Jonah. And Jesus often addressed Peter as Simon, son of Jonah, when he was wanting Peter to lean in and understand something. Sort of like with Charlie.

You know, I can say, Charlie, he doesn’t listen. I have to yell Charles Isaac to even hope to get his attention. Jesus calls him by his name for him to lean in and pay attention.

He was treating Peter not as an enemy, but as a friend who needed some gentle correction here. And so he asked him in verse 15, do you love me more than these? And I’ve seen lots of commentaries about what he means by that phrase, more than these.

I think in the context of their whole story together, I don’t think he’s talking about Peter’s love of fishing. I don’t think he’s talking about Peter’s love of the fish. I think he’s saying, do you love me more than all these other disciples?

Because that’s what you claimed. Do you love me more than these? He had boasted about being the most devoted disciple, but then had betrayed Jesus.

So he asked him, do you love me more than these? And the word Jesus used here for love is agape. Now, I’m not going to get too heavy into the Greek here.

Some of you have heard probably the accounts of the different words for love in the New Testament. Agape describes an unconditional self-sacrificial love. It describes the love of God.

And that’s what Jesus asked. Do you love me? And Peter says, yes, Lord, you know that I love you.

He uses a different word, phileo, which means brotherly love. And so immediately we’re probably tempted to think, well, he’s saying I love you a little less than what you’re talking about. But if you’ve heard those lessons on the different meanings of the different words for love, there’s some other shades of meaning with those words that I just learned about this week as I was studying this.

When you’re talking about agape, it can describe a rational love, like an attachment with the brain. When you’re talking about phileo, it’s also a love that you feel in the gut. It’s instinctive.

You feel it. A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a couple people from here, and a politician’s name came up, a former elected official. And I said, oh, I love that guy. It’s kind of an odd thing to say, but when I was a freshman in college, his was one of the first campaigns I ever volunteered on.

And I thought about that this week as I was reading this. I love that guy in the sense that I think he was a good man. I think we shared, and I’m not telling you who it is, but I think we shared similar values and similar worldview and similar policy ideas.

And so I had this rational attachment to that man. But it’s not the same as the love I instinctively feel for my wife or my children. It shouldn’t be.

If I feel that same kind of love, that same kind of attachment to my politicians, there’s a problem, right? So I think that’s, and some of the Greek commentaries I looked at this week said it’s kind of the same. you can also compare those words in that way.

That Jesus is saying, do you love me? Think about it. Do you love me?

And Peter’s saying, I love you. Like I feel it in my heart. I feel it down in the core.

It would be like us saying, I love you so bad it hurts. So by using a different word here, Peter’s not denying he loves Jesus. I think he’s talking about the strength of his love for Jesus saying, I don’t just agape you.

I don’t just love you up here. I feel it from down in the bottom of my heart. And Jesus said, if Peter loved him, he would feed his lambs.

And we’ll come back to that in a few minutes. Now he asked him a second question that’s largely a repeat of the first question. He says, do you love me?

Again, he asks about the agape love. Peter says, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. He responds with that phileo love again.

And Jesus says, well, if you love me, in verse 16, tend my sheep, take care of my sheep. So then the third time, Jesus says, do you love me? And I believe Peter was grieved not only because he’s been asked this now three times, and it draws his attention back to the three denials, but also Jesus switches words here.

He says, do you love me? And he switches to phileo. So while Jesus has been saying, think about it, do you love me?

And Peter says, I love you. I feel it down here. And Jesus says, do you love me?

And Peter says, I feel it down here. Jesus now the third time says, do you really love me? Do you really feel it here?

Is it genuine? It caused Peter grief. So he’s asking, do you really love me as deeply as you claim?

Peter says, you know all things. Lord, you know everything. Why try to lie to you?

Why try to hide anything? You know everything. Of course, I love you.

You know this. And Jesus says, well, if you love me, feed my sheep. So now that I’ve taken a few minutes to explain the discussion about Peter’s love for Jesus, we need to look at what Jesus told him to do as a result of that love, because that’s really what this is about.

Jesus giving him some marching orders as a result of his love. We’ve got these three statements. If you love me, feed my lambs.

If you love me, tend my sheep. If you love me, feed my sheep. So in these three commands, Peter told Jesus to do two things.

There are two command words given in those three verses. One is to feed and one is to tend. We kind of understand what feeding means.

You know, you provide for their everyday care. Benjamin feeds the dog, thank goodness, because That’s how he eats. If Benjamin forgets, I’m going to forget too because I’m used to Benjamin doing it.

He goes out there, he feeds him, gives him water, does all the daily stuff that he needs. When he says, feed my lambs, he’s talking about provide for their daily care, their everyday needs. But in verse 16, he uses the word tend.

And these are different words in the Greek also. I’m not going to go into all that. But this word tend has a broader meaning than that word feed.

You can go in and feed an animal real quick and just provide for its needs, its immediate needs, and get out of there. But tending is something altogether different. It’s a relational thing.

It’s the shepherd who’s with the sheep all the time, taking care of them, guiding them, loving them, leading them like a shepherd. And so he’s told Peter, if you love me, you will do both of those things. And he identifies two different groups of individuals that he’s supposed to do that to.

The lambs and the sheep. Now you’ve got the sheep that, I was going to say are self-sufficient, they’re really not. I’ve never had sheep myself, but I’ve talked to people who have and they say they’re pretty dumb animals.

They need a lot of care. But you’ve got the sheep who can go out and kind of graze on their own a little bit. And then you’ve got the lambs who really need the intense care because not only are they sheep, but they’re baby sheep.

So I think Jesus, as he’s using this analogy of lambs and sheep to describe his people, he’s saying from the biggest on down to the smallest from the easiest to the most difficult he says Peter if you love me go take care of my people go take care of all of them the the the big important ones to the little ones that need lots of attention and lots of care take care of them don’t just take care of their everyday needs the simple things watch over them like a shepherd care for them, love them, walk with them. Jesus was telling Peter that if Peter loved Jesus, that love was going to show up in the way that he cared for the people that Jesus loved. Let me say that again.

Jesus was telling Peter that if Peter really loved Jesus, it was going to show up in the way he cared for those that Jesus loved. Doesn’t the Bible say something about they will know we are Christians by our love. They’ll know we are his disciples if we have love for one another.

So we need to take this and see how it applies to our situation today. We have to be very careful. Always look at the context in scripture.

We need to be careful that we read scripture in the context that God intended us to understand it. We don’t want to take every command in scripture and assume it was written to us. Now hear me on this.

It was written for us, but not every command in scripture was written to us. Okay. When God told Abraham, go out and sacrifice Isaac.

If you take that and say, oh, that’s for me too. It says it in the Bible. So I must be supposed to go do it.

You will go to jail. All right. Done.

That was for Abraham. That was not for you. Told him to go sacrifice his son.

Don’t try that. Okay. God has not commanded you to do that.

And there are all sorts of commands in scripture that were given to a specific person for a specific event. And Jesus in this moment is talking to Peter. He’s really not even talking to all the disciples.

He’s locked in on Peter. This is for Peter. However, it doesn’t mean there’s not anything that we can learn from it.

Even if the command is to somebody specific in Scripture for a specific situation, there are always principles in play here that we can learn something from and apply God’s word to our lives. So that being said, this incident was about Peter having blown it in ministry And now wondering, can God ever use me again? Does Jesus want anything to do with me?

And this was Jesus recommissioning Peter, saying, you’ve messed up, you’ve denied me three times, now affirm your love for me three times, and we’re going to start over. So this was about Peter, and this was about what he specifically needed to do. And you and I don’t have the same calling or authority as Peter, but here’s the principle we can draw from the command that he received and that we can apply to our lives.

If we love Jesus, it will show up in the way that we care for others. This is not the only passage of Scripture that teaches that, by the way. If we love Jesus, it’s going to show up in our treatment of others.

Now, for Jesus to call his people his sheep indicates a great love and familiarity. I didn’t realize this. Well, I guess I didn’t realize how deeply this ran until a few months ago.

I preached a series of messages in Seminole on this relationship between the sheep and the shepherd because Jesus uses that over and over again. And as I studied through some of those passages, I realized just how deeply attached Jesus was saying that he is to his people. The relationship between the sheep and the shepherd, they would grow to know each other.

The shepherd would know the sheep individually. To me, they just look like a bunch of clouds running across a field. I can’t tell them apart.

But the shepherd knows each of them and he knows their personalities and he loves them. So Jesus was telling them, by calling sheep and lambs, he was saying there’s a great attachment here between him and us. And if we love the shepherd, then we will care for the other sheep.

If we love the shepherd, we’ll care for the other sheep. How do we do that? We look for opportunities to meet their physical and spiritual needs because when you look at feeding and tending, it really covers the whole spectrum of what they need.

So we as believers, if we love Jesus, it’s going to show up in us taking the time and the opportunity and the trouble to meet the needs of our brothers and sisters. It’s going to show up. And I’m sure each of us could probably think of somebody right now that God has placed in close proximity to us who has a need that God has put us just in a position to be able to meet, in a position to be able to care for them and to meet that need.

And I want to be clear here because I heard something on the radio this week that I thought made a good point. A man was lamenting the fact that in so many American churches, the gospel has been watered down to be nice and give us your money. That’s a problem.

Because that’s not the gospel. This message to you this morning is not just be nice and take care of others. This is about a love for the shepherd, a commitment to the shepherd that leads us, that compels us to do what the shepherd would do if he were still physically here.

That’s what he’s left us here to do. It’s not just about being nice. It’s about growing to be more like Jesus and imitating him out of that love for him.

We love him and so we want to be more like him. I’ve seen my son’s face light up when somebody tells him, you’re just like your daddy, depending on the tone of voice they use when they tell him that. And even Madeline, when she finds something that she and I like to eat that nobody else does, I say, oh, you like that too?

She says, I’m your girl. And they want to be like daddy to an extent. I understand that.

I grew up too. I wanted to be like my daddy and like my papa. If we love Jesus, we should want to be like him.

Follow that example of that self-sacrificial, unconditional love that we don’t just profess, but we actually do something with. It’s not enough to say, Lord, I love you. He says, go and show it.

If you love me, it’ll show up. If we love him, we’ll follow his example because Jesus is the compassionate shepherd of the sheep. And if we’re following his example, we will also be compassionate with his sheep.

To love others like Jesus is something though that we are incapable of doing on our own. I don’t have a heart as big as Jesus and neither do you. So for us to love others the way that Jesus does, we need his help.

We have to pray for his guidance. We have to rely on his strength. We have to grow closer to him.

We have to seek that relationship with him. and we have to let him love others through us. More than just telling you this morning, be nice and do better.

I hope that’s never the message you take away from church because that’s not the gospel. The message is not be nice and do better. The message is draw closer to Jesus.

Draw closer to Jesus and he’ll take care of making you nicer and better. He’ll take care of all that. He’s better qualified to do it.

But the things that he calls us to do so many times are things that we are incapable of doing because we’re sinners. So we have to let Jesus do those things through us. We draw closer to him and he gives us the capacity because nobody is going to love those sheep like Jesus.

Nobody loves the sheep like Jesus. And our best way to love the other sheep is for him to love them through us. Because Jesus loved the sheep enough to make the ultimate sacrifice for us.

He made sacrifices for his sheep that not one of us would make. Jesus saw us in our lost sinful condition. He saw that we were separated from a holy God because of our sin.

Sin is every act or thought or word or attitude of disobedience. And Jesus saw that we are all sinners. And he saw how that sin separates us from God and how we are hopeless to do anything to fix it.

We’re hopeless to rescue ourselves because that sin separates us in this life and it separates us in eternity. And there’s no way out for us. Jesus saw us in that pit of sin and despair.

and loved us enough that he came to earth to be the perfect sinless sacrifice so that he could be nailed to the cross in our place. He could shed his blood and he could die to pay for our sins in full. We didn’t deserve that.

We didn’t deserve his grace or mercy. He didn’t deserve the punishment that he got, but he took it in our place. He did it because he loved us.

He sacrificed. The shepherd sacrificed himself for the sheep. Nobody loves like Jesus.

Nobody loves the sheep like Jesus because nobody is going to sacrifice for the sheep the way our shepherd did. He saw us with a problem we couldn’t fix. He sacrificed himself to pay for our sins in full so that we could be forgiven and we could be reconciled to a holy God.

This morning, if you realize you need that, again, the message here is not be good. The message here is draw closer to Jesus. And if you’re sitting there thinking, I know I’m separated from God.

I know that I’m a sinner. I know that things are not right between me and God. The answer there again, draw closer to Jesus.

This morning, talk to him, deal with him, acknowledge, admit that you are a sinner. He already knows it. Again, why try to lie to him?

He knows. Admit that you’re a sinner. Admit that you know you’re separated from God and you deserve to be.

But also acknowledge that you believe Jesus died in your place to pay for your sins in full. That what he did on the cross was all that was necessary to throw the doors of heaven wide open to you so that the father could receive you. Acknowledge Him as your one and only Savior and that He rose again to prove it and ask God to forgive you because of what Jesus Christ did.