Very thankful to be here tonight. It has been a wonderful weekend together, thinking about this theme: redeeming the time.
I would like for us to begin by looking at the theme scripture. But before we do, let us look again at this phrase, “redeeming the time,” as it is found in Colossians 4.
Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders, redeeming the time.
Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt,
so that you will know how you should respond to each person.
And then let us go back to Ephesians 5 and begin in verse 14.
Awake, sleeper,
And arise from the dead,
And Christ will shine on you.Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
So then do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.
And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit.
Lord, we come to You and we worship You. We thank You that we can draw near. Father, You have given us a passageway into Your presence through our Lord Jesus. How we worship You tonight.
And as we gather, we want to be able to redeem this time. We know that comes when the Holy Spirit takes human words and mixes them with divine burden and conviction. So we pray that You would be upon us in this hour. Help us to understand how to walk in this evil day.
We thank You for so many hearts gathered with that one selfsame purpose. We pray that You bless us, as You have always blessed us when we come together. In Jesus’ precious name, amen.
You know, I think probably I would like to begin by speaking about the prophetic element being spoken here by the apostle Paul.
Paul has been sharing this wonderful epistle of Ephesians, and in Ephesians 5 he begins to speak to God’s children—God’s sons—about how to walk as children of light. He speaks to them about holiness. He speaks to them about walking in the light. He speaks to them about having nothing to do with the deeds of darkness.
In the midst of speaking about these things, he comes to a moment where he takes off the hat of a teacher and puts on the hat of a prophet. He says, “Therefore it says.” Where is it that it says this? No scholar can find this scripture that Paul now says, “Therefore it says.” Well, maybe it is the Holy Spirit, but Paul is prophetically saying:
Awake, O sleeper,
And arise from the dead,
And Christ will shine on you.
It is as if he is bringing this prophetic burden before us: This is an important time. Paul is saying, “We have got to redeem these times.”
That word redeem actually means to buy back, or buy out of. It implies that something has encroached upon the Lord’s territory. We have got to buy back our time. We have got to buy back our lives.
If we do not wake up and realize it, the enemy continues to encroach with his weeds into that beautiful garden that the Lord has made His own. So this is a prophetic word.
Our brother Mac shared this interesting distinction last night. Many of you may have seen it before. In Greek, there are two words used for time.
There is chronos, like a chronometer: “What time is it?” or “Next year.” It is the linear dimension of time.
But then there is kairos. Kairos speaks about time that is filled with something: time filled with evil, time filled with good, time redeemed because the Lord is in that time.
It is in this buying back of our times—a good translation for kairos—that we see the prophetic dimension of this simple scripture.
It is funny that most prophecy today is thought of in linear terms. “The Lord is coming back.” Well, when? What day? Some guy just said it was last week, right? And they were wrong yet again.
We want to know the final event. We want to know the linear development. Oh, how we want to study it. But prophecy is not about chronos. Prophecy is about kairos, because prophecy is saying, “Are you living in this time? Are you present in this time?”
The Lord wants you to be present in this time.
Awake, O sleeper.
Rise from the dead.
Christ will shine on you.
Your times will change.
Every one of us is limited to our chronos. We have so many years upon this earth, and they are ticking away. But if you live your chronos in kairos, then your life has purpose, your life has meaning, and your life is redemptive. Redeem your time.
The prophetic dimension implies that we are not always aware of the times that are right around us. It is a sudden thing. It is like when Jacob woke up and said, “The Lord was here, and I did not realize it.”
These verses are actually about the fact that the Lord is coming. The closest scripture that satisfies this verse Paul has taken liberty with is worth looking at. It is at the end of Isaiah 59 and the beginning of Isaiah 60.
In Isaiah 59:19, in this great battle for Zion, Isaiah says:
When the enemy comes in like a flood,
The Spirit of the Lord raises up a standard against him.
That is a wonderful verse in the King James Version. The Hebrew, according to many scholars, is in line with that translation: when the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit raises up a standard against him.
Then Isaiah goes on:
A Redeemer will come to Zion,
And to those who turn from transgression in Jacob, declares the Lord.As for Me, this is My covenant with them, says the Lord:
My Spirit which is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth,
shall not depart from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your offspring,
nor from the mouth of your offspring’s offspring, says the Lord,
from now and forever.
Then Isaiah 60 begins:
Arise, shine; for your light has come,
And the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For behold, darkness will cover the earth
And deep darkness the peoples;
But the Lord will arise upon you
And His glory will appear upon you.
Nations will come to your light,
And kings to the brightness of your rising.
You see how that is? Wake up. Wake up, O you who sleep, and Christ will shine upon you. “Arise, shine, for your light has come.” This is talking about the coming of the Lord. It is time to wake up.
There are deeper things going on than simply fighting the devil and hoping that we are hanging on. No, that is not it at all. This brings us into a prophetic understanding of the times in which we live.
Are you living chronos, or are you living kairos? Do you see the Lord’s purpose in this moment, or do you just see the passage of time?
This is why you notice the phrase “redeeming the time” in both Ephesians and Colossians.
In Ephesians, it speaks of the sense of encroachment—that evil is coming in. It is time to stand up as children of light and stop that evil encroachment. For the days are evil. In the evil day, in the day when you are under attack, it is time to stand up as children of light.
Colossians 4 takes it another step forward. Redeeming the time is not merely stopping the encroachment; it is encroaching into the enemy’s territory with the gospel, shared in such a way, with grace and salt, that people come to the light and come to Jesus.
Even in this evil day, the gates of Hades shall not prevail against the church. There is ground to be gained and taken. But in these things, we have to awake to see what is going on.
Tonight, we are going to look at Peter and his wake-up call.
I want us to look at a whole bunch of scriptures because, when Peter got up before the judgment seat of the Lord, these scriptures were put before him. The angel rolled the videotape. In all these scriptures, Peter’s name is in it. It is pretty humiliating.
Of course, next time they will roll a second videotape. When you get to heaven, you may say, “Oh, I was a good boy,” and the angels will say, “Okay, Mel, roll the videotape.” We are just going to see what you were like when you were serving the Lord.
Unfortunately, most of you do not know what a videotape is, I realize. It is already DVDs—and now some kind of a thumb, I do not know—but you get the idea.
Here we go. Matthew 16:18:
I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.
Matthew 16:23:
But He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.”
Mark 9:5:
Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three tabernacles, one for You, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
And then it says, “For he did not know what to answer.”
Matthew 26:35:
Peter said to Him, “Even if I have to die with You, I will not deny You.”
And all the disciples said the same thing. Amen.
Mark 14:37:
And He came and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour?”
John 18:10-11:
Simon Peter then, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear; and the slave’s name was Malchus.
So Jesus said to Peter, “Put the sword into the sheath; the cup which the Father has given Me, shall I not drink it?”
Luke 22:61:
The Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how He had told him, “Before a rooster crows today, you will deny Me three times.”
And he went out and wept bitterly.
John 21:15:
So when they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love Me more than these?”
He said to Him, “Yes, Lord; You know that I love You.”
He said to him, “Tend My lambs.”
How about if that story was flashed before you, and you remembered all those times—all those times with Jesus?
The Lord called Peter, of course, and Peter is a wonderful example of a brother who had to learn how to redeem the times. The good news is that the second videotape is much better. He learned how to redeem the time.
When Jesus met Peter, Peter had already repented. He had been baptized by John the Baptist. He was a good man; he was a righteous man. But Peter had a more subtle problem than the darkness of sin around him in the world.
He was, as it were, a child of light even in his Jewish days. He was not unrighteous in that darkness. But there was a subtle problem that prevented Peter from redeeming the time.
The subtle problem was this: his self stood in the way.
If you flash back with your memory to those verses I just showed you, you will see how many times his self-life stood in the way. Peter was out of sync with the Lord so many times that he almost provides comic relief in the Gospels.
He is saying yes, and the Lord is saying no. He is saying, “Let’s go,” and the Lord says, “Stay.” He says, “Send them away,” and the Lord says, “You feed them.” He was always out of sync with the Lord’s heart.
You cannot redeem the time if you are out of sync with the Lord and His ways—if you do not know His will and you do not know His Word. You will try for sure, as Peter tried for sure. That is why we all love Peter. He tried and tried and tried, and the more he tried, the farther behind he got.
It is a lesson for all of us to learn. You might assume that Jesus should call disciples who already know how to redeem the time. Yet Peter was probably a diligent fisherman. He had a good work ethic. He worked hard at fishing, and he had a good, righteous life and a good heart.
If we had Peter—even at this stage when his self was in the way—we would immediately make him the treasurer of the fellowship, one of our main speakers, a deacon, or a Sunday school teacher. For sure. We love people whose self is in the way.
But he could not redeem the time. As a matter of fact, at this time he wasted a lot of time. Only the Lord knew how to corral a person like that.
Peter was a regular Missouri mule. That is an old expression most of you do not know. The only way you got one of those Missouri mules to move was to smack it with a two-by-four right in the front of the head.
Timothy was a sensitive guy. He already knew he was wrong before he did anything. Peter was a bull in a china shop. That is why we love him so. He was so outgoing. He had tremendous personality. He was always the first to speak.
Peter might have been a hardworking fisherman. He might have been diligent even in counting the change after the fish were sold. But here is the point we see simply by looking at Peter’s life:
Natural diligence does not transfer into spiritual diligence.
You might be one who has your time worked out in time-and-motion and management studies, but that does not mean you have learned how to spiritually redeem the time. It is a whole other thing.
Today we have a younger generation of people here. That is why I am using a computer—just trying to impress somebody.
You ask them to speak next Sunday, and they say, “No problem.” They go home, get on the Blue Bible, get on the internet, cut and paste a good message in an hour and a half, and still have time to play with the children and go out for the evening.
Or you ask them whether they have a devotion. “Oh, I have a devotion every day. I wake up in the morning, bing, turn on the thing, here comes a verse. I look at it, then I read somebody else’s devotion. ‘Hey, man, Lord, I have got to go to work.’”
We have a very efficient bunch of people. The problem is that learning to redeem the time means we have to start the day with some wasted time in the presence of the Lord.
Have you ever had a devotion where you spent unhurried time in the presence of the Lord?
A. B. Simpson was a famous New York City preacher and one of my heroes as a boy. He learned about the life of Christ dwelling within him. He was so busy, running around here and there, and one day Christ within him spoke and said, “Baby, I am waiting every morning within you to talk to you, and you to Me.”
That changed his life. He realized that the Lord was waiting every morning for him to talk, but so many mornings he was simply too busy—running out the door with a wing and a prayer.
Learning this matter of redeeming the time, unfortunately, is not a natural trait we simply pick up. It is not easy. The Bible says a natural man cannot accept the things of the Spirit; he does not understand them. You can be the sharpest of natural men, but you will not know how to redeem the time.
But the Lord knows how to teach us to redeem the time. He knew how to teach the apostle Peter, and He knows how to teach us.
Do you know how He does it? This was Jesus’ remedy to teach Peter how to redeem the time:
“Follow Me.”
That is what Peter needed. That is what taught Peter what it meant to redeem time. That is what brought Peter to the cross so that he could redeem the time. Follow Me.
Brothers and sisters, if you are very efficient naturally, but if you spend more than ten minutes in devotion and your mind starts wandering into other things, and you feel that in spiritual things you have very little discipline, then join Peter’s club and follow the Lord.
From this simple scripture in Ephesians 5, I want to take us through Peter’s life in a certain way. We will see that the Lord gives us three things in this scripture:
Awake, O sleeper,
And arise from the dead,
And Christ will shine on you.
There are three things I want us to see in these first lessons on Peter.
Peter had to wake up. How does one wake up? By contrast. You see something that makes you realize that you do not see something.
Maybe you thought you knew how to pray, and then you met somebody who really prayed. The contrast woke you up. Maybe you thought you knew how to love, but then you saw somebody who really loved. You said, “Oh.”
I thought I was a Christian because my mother was a Christian Scientist. I figured whatever my mother was, I must be by inheritance. Later I realized Christian Science was neither Christian nor science.
When people asked, “Are you a Christian?” I said, “Yeah, I am a Christian.” Then I met a Christian. This Christian asked me to pray, and then I heard the Christian pray. They knew their God. They loved their Jesus. I did not know that.
Contrast, you see. Awake. The brightness makes us say, “Whoa.” Jacob said, “Whoa.” The men on the road to Emmaus said, “Wait a minute, our hearts are burning.” We wake up.
That is the first stage. By contrast, Peter began to see: “I think I need to learn how to get into this kairos business—the times Jesus is walking in while I am just watching.”
Then the second thing is this: Christ will shine on you.
The Lord, our Father in heaven, really wants you to see who Jesus is. So He arranges events in Peter’s life so that Peter can see just who Jesus is.
If we are to redeem the time, we have to have a vision of who Jesus is and what He is about. If we are going to avoid foolishness and do the will of God, we have to have a vision of Jesus and His will.
The third part Peter did not get to while Jesus was walking with him. It is that our self-life has to be undone by the work of the cross.
We may wake up and see the difference. We may have a revelation of Christ and say, “Oh, that is life.” Yet we still cannot redeem the time because our self is always in the way. We are always working and living out of self.
Unless something can be done about that, it is pretty frustrating. Peter went down a frustrated man until Jesus rose from the dead.
So: wake up, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. Those are the three things. Tonight, we are looking particularly at the first two.
John the Baptist was probably with John the apostle and Andrew when Jesus came walking by. John and Andrew began to follow Jesus from the Jordan River, away from John the Baptist.
Peter was already a disciple of John the Baptist. You can imagine why he loved John. John the Baptist was robust. John the Baptist was all, “Repent! Get straight! Be baptized! The kingdom is coming!”
Peter was a man’s man. John the Baptist was a man’s man. He was chewing on locusts, spitting out the heads, eating wild honey. This was Peter’s kind of man.
Peter was all in. He was a follower of John the Baptist. He believed in baptism. He believed the kingdom was coming. He did not know what to do about it, so the only thing he knew to do was go back home fishing and wait until Jesus came.
He was busy. That is like a lot of Christians. Oh, they love the Lord. They have been baptized. They cannot wait for Jesus to come back. Meanwhile, they work an eighty-hour week.
Peter missed spending a whole day with Jesus. But the next day, Andrew found Peter and said, “You have got to meet this guy. He is the Messiah. I think He is the Messiah.”
Peter comes into the presence of Jesus, and Jesus says, “Your name is Simon. I am changing your name to Peter—the Rock.”
Peter probably felt pretty good about that. Maybe he was a big guy; he was a fisherman. But spiritually, he was anything but a boulder. He was as changeable as the weather—hot one moment, cold the next; with you one moment, fighting against you the next.
By the time he had walked with Jesus two weeks, he was already telling Jesus what He should do. What are you going to do with somebody like that? “Follow Me.” That is all you have got to do.
If you had asked Peter, “What is your idea of redeeming the time for the days of evil?” he would have said, “You have got to repent. You have got to be baptized. You have got to deny yourself. You have got to fast. You have got to pray. You have got to renounce the world. Better to live in the desert.”
Peter was in full sympathy with John the Baptist and his rugged ministry. Then Jesus says, “Come, follow Me.”
In John 2, one of the first things that happens after they meet is this: Jesus goes to a wedding feast. How do you redeem the time for the days of evil? “Let’s go to a wedding feast, where we sit around and talk, have fun, eat a little, and drink a little.”
Peter is looking around, saying, “Wait a minute. I see John’s redeeming the time. What is Jesus doing?” Then Jesus turns water into wine. Did He really need to do that? There are so many Baptists upset about that.
Peter sees the contrast. He expected Jesus to do something dynamic like John the Baptist. Instead, Jesus spends a couple of days at a wedding feast and changes water into wine. Peter does not get it.
But later, perhaps he understood. Jesus was teaching His disciples a lesson about the nature of ministry.
John’s ministry was tremendous, but it was external. It was a ministry of repentance, baptism in water, and proclamation to the geographical nation of Israel that the kingdom was coming. It was the highest ministry that could be produced out of the old covenant.
But Jesus was after something else. In John 3, His first interview says, “You cannot enter the kingdom unless you are born of the Spirit.” Jesus’ ministry was internal—a matter of the Spirit.
Jesus did signs, and people watched the signs. But Jesus said, “Do you not see what is behind the signs? Look at that sign. It is pointing to something. What is it pointing to? To the I AM behind the sign.”
Peter was a very external man, and most of us are. That is why we like a lot of external things in religion. If you get a good Christian church that tells you twenty-six thousand things you have got to do, you will love it.
I used to be a Baptist. They had about fourteen ordinances you had to do. You could not drink, smoke, chew, or go out where girls do. You had to tithe. They had a whole list. I felt like I was really religious—just keep those fourteen things.
But Jesus, by contrast, had a ministry of the Spirit. He had come to baptize—immerse—in the Holy Spirit. He had come to bring in a spiritual kingdom.
The outward kingdom will indeed come, but it is born out of an inward reality that breaks in upon people. Unless somebody inwardly sees who the King is, there is no point in Jesus sitting down on an external throne and saying, “Now I am the King.”
The contrast Peter saw at that wedding feast was deeper than merely the contrast between Jesus and John the Baptist. The Lord was doing something deeper.
The Lord Jesus comes with life—rivers of life. This life is not a religion; it is life. And when this life comes through, it has to break down the wall of separation between secular and sacred.
All religion has this kind of division. But when Jesus comes with His life, it is life. It is not secular and sacred. That whole thing blows up.
Peter, with the secular-sacred idea in his Jewish mind, could work and worship mammon six days a week—collecting as many fish as he could and cheating people when he sold them—but on the Sabbath he could suddenly be religious.
On a feast day, he could make the offerings, talk about God, eat the feast, and say, “Ah, what a good boy I am.” Six days for mammon, one day for the Lord. “But I keep the Sabbath. I found the loophole.”
That is the way a lot of people live their lives. They live absolutely worldly, but then think, “Oh yeah, there is a sacred dimension. I need to go to church more.”
Jesus came and made all life sacred. That is why He got in trouble. Every day was Sabbath for Him. Every day was a wedding feast for Him. Every day was Jubilee for Him.
He was working because the Father was working, and people could not understand it. They said, “No, no, there is a separation here. There is the secular, and then there is the sacred.” Jesus said, “No, it is life.”
“I am going to a wedding because a wedding is as important as a baptism, and a baptism is as important as breaking bread, because it is life. It is life, not religion.”
How hard that is to see. Jesus went through Galilee in everyday situations and brought kairos into those situations. Suddenly, He came by, and life was worth living. There was real life there. He healed, He did good, and He saved.
Peter finally found out why Jesus brought him to the wedding first. The Lord wanted to sanctify Peter’s marriage, from the usual idea of marriage to the understanding that he and his wife were joint heirs of the grace of life.
Peter later tells us that. The Lord got hold of both Peter and his wife and brought them into a spiritual reality of what marriage should be: a testimony of joint heirs of the grace of life.
Jesus was coming to invade Peter’s whole life. He changed Peter’s fishing skills to teach him how to fish for men. Jesus is after life—our whole life. There is no special day. Every day is redeemed time. Every day. Every situation.
The main contrast Peter saw was the difference between Jesus’ ministry and anything he had ever seen before.
After the wedding feast, they went up to Jerusalem for Passover. I imagine Peter looking over that temple and saying, “Oh man, I love this temple. Such a beautiful place. Listen to the Levitical singing. Smell the lamb. I smell God here. This is so wonderful. This is so religious.”
Then he sees Jesus walk in and become angry. Jesus knocks over the tables, drives people out, and says, “Get out of My Father’s house. This is a house of prayer. What have you done to it?”
They said, “What right have You to do that? What sign can You show us?” Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
I hope you can appreciate the shock value for Peter. Everything he held dear about religion, Jesus had just smote.
All that love for the temple building itself, all that love of tradition and outward activity—and Jesus said, “If it is not My Father’s house of prayer, it is nothing. Tear it down. I will build it up in three days.”
Of course, that was so preposterous Peter could not possibly have understood it. After Jesus rose from the dead, that is when they understood what He was saying.
But they had seen something that staggered them: someone with such love for the Father and such zeal for His house. They had never seen such a thing before.
Brothers and sisters, we need to wake up. If we are sleeping, we need to wake up. If we do not understand the Lord’s deep jealousy for the Father’s house—that it should be a house of prayer, a place of purity, love, and holiness—then we are out of sync with where the Lord is.
What do you think about the church? How about the fellowship where you are? Is everything okay? Have you heard what the Lord thinks about it?
Time to wake up. Arise from the dead. Listen to what the Lord is saying.
The Lord said to the church of Ephesus in Revelation 2:
Remember from where you have fallen, and repent.
Do we even know? Are we so sleepy that we do not think we have lost any ground? The Lord wants us to awake to His heart.
He is very zealous for the Father’s house—more zealous than you might think. You may think He is a perfect gentleman, but when He sees His house being destroyed and the enemy encroaching, He has something to say.
When Jesus went into Galilee, as Matthew 4 says, quoting Isaiah 9:
The people who were sitting in darkness saw a great light.
Let me pose a question. The day before Jesus came to Galilee, do you think the people there would have said, “We are in darkness”?
They would have said, “Come on, we have our religion. We go down to the temple during feast time. We have our synagogues. Joe the rabbi is a good guy. We are not in darkness. We lead a righteous life. We do a lot of fishing, but we love God.”
Then Jesus came on the scene, and those who sat in darkness said, “Whoa. Where have we been? What have we been doing? I repent.”
Oh, that Jesus would come to His sleepy church and show us by way of contrast what He really desires.
Jesus allowed Peter to keep walking with Him. The more Peter walked with Him, the more he saw the contrast. He did not always understand it, but later, as Peter testified through the Gospel of Mark, we see something of what it means to redeem the time by looking at Jesus’ ministry.
Jesus came into Galilee, bound the strong man, did tremendous works, and preached the gospel of the kingdom. Peter could only describe it this way: “Immediately He went there, and immediately He went there, and immediately He went there.”
That is how Jesus redeemed the time. The disciples were saying, “Hey, Jesus, when do we get two weeks off?” But Jesus was immediately here, immediately there, immediately healing, immediately teaching, immediately breaking bread, immediately doing a miracle, immediately touching the leper.
There was spiritual diligence there. There was rapidity of action because He was the Servant of the Lord. But He had been empowered by the Holy Spirit so that He could actually encroach into the darkness with light.
In the midst of all that “immediately, immediately, immediately,” there is this phrase: “As was His custom.” What was that custom?
He went aside early in the morning and waited on the Lord.
Perhaps Peter was snoring as Jesus went off at four o’clock in the morning to the hillside. Peter may have wondered, “What is Jesus doing now? I have got to get some more shut-eye,” and rolled over and went back to sleep.
I do not know how long it took the disciples to make the connection. But the power Jesus had to encroach upon Galilee with the gospel was rooted in the fact that He had already redeemed the time before the day even began, alone with the Father in prayer.
He had communed. He had sought the Lord. He had asked for wisdom. I do not think Jesus simply walked along and, off the cuff, came up with every parable. I believe that in communing with the Father, He thought about such things, and the Father gave Him wisdom in little examples.
Jesus had redeemed the time before the day even came. The disciples did not realize that. They only saw the action and the amazing Jesus moving from place to place.
How can we encroach into the darkness that seems to be folding around us with its tentacles? It will not happen merely by fleshly actions.
I have friends who went to the United Nations last Monday. They held banners against the nuclear deal with Iran. Fifty-five buses came. They demonstrated, and then they went home. I never heard anything about it. It was not on television—nothing.
I am not saying there are never times when we need to stand up like that. But something has to begin inwardly, with spiritual burden, spiritual enablement, and wisdom about how to move forward before we simply go jumping out there.
I have a feeling that one reason we often find ourselves asleep at the switch, going through a day that can hardly be called redeemed, is because we started the day uncovered, unprepared, and insensitive to the Spirit’s leading.
When we are unprepared, the enemy can hit us from the left or the right. We are uncovered. We are not under the blood. The Lord has been merciful to us despite our unpreparedness, but we should learn that lesson.
Jesus came on the scene and said in Mark 1:
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.
People were sitting there waiting for the kingdom to come sometime in chronology. John told them it was going to come soon in their chronology. But Jesus came and said, “It is already here. Do you see it?”
That is the whole point. If we see prophetically what the Lord is saying, we are already living in His coming, if we see it. Isaiah 60 is about us being part of that light, because His light has arisen upon us.
What do you see? What time zone are you in? When you are in kairos, the time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is right here. Do you see it? Repent, if you do.
When Jesus was there, people felt the King was there. When Jesus was there, they could touch the kingdom. When Jesus healed someone, they said, “The kingdom is there.” Then Jesus said, “Repent and get in this thing.”
I call it the kingdom time zone. What time are you in? Are you simply in Saturday night at whatever time it is, or are you in the kingdom time zone?
That is where Jesus is very present, and He is doing something in my heart right now. Some people are in, and some people are out. Some people are snoring now. Some people may be in the kingdom zone but tired. You do not always know.
Peter later grasps this when he writes his letters. He speaks about the coming, the judgment, and the things that are to come, and he says, “Do you know what time it is?”
Where Jesus is Lord now—that is practically the kingdom of God.
If you are fancy-footing around, doing whatever you want in your life, with no strings attached—if you do not feel the Spirit leading, brooding, stirring, or fermenting—I do not know whether you are practically in the kingdom time zone.
Is Jesus Lord now, practically, over your life right now? Kingdom time zone.
Christ revealed Himself to Peter time and time again. Let me mention just a few.
You remember Luke 5, when Jesus gets into Peter’s boat. Jesus reveals Himself in Peter’s boat. He showed miracles when He touched the leper and cast out demons, but it is a whole other thing when Jesus comes into your life and takes over your boat.
Jesus needed a place to preach because everyone was pressing in on Him. He said, “Peter, could I get in your boat?” Peter said, “Sure, sure, come on in my boat.”
Peter had been working a lot. He tried to follow Jesus as much as he could, but he still fished. He would run up and follow, then come back and fish. He thought, “I have got to quit the secular and just be sacred.”
No, that is not what Jesus wanted. Jesus did not merely want Peter to quit his job. He wanted to bring His kairos into Peter’s boat. There is no secular-sacred division. The Lord wants to use your job for His purposes.
Peter was in the back of the boat, keeping it steady while Jesus preached amazing things. Peter probably thought, “Aren’t I a good boy? I am giving to the Lord. He is using my boat.” It is nice when we give Jesus some money. He needs it so badly.
Then came the awkward moment. Jesus said, “Peter, let us go out for a noonday catch in the deep.”
Peter knew Jesus was a carpenter, and Peter was a fisherman. You fish at night. You fish in the shallows because you have a dragnet that brings fish in on the shallows. Jesus was saying: noon, wrong time; deep water, wrong place; tides wrong; net wrong—everything wrong.
But Jesus was his Master. Peter had said, “I will follow You.” He had caught nothing all night anyway, so he was flat broke.
Master, we worked hard all night and caught nothing, but I will do as You say and let down the nets.
The Lord filled his boat. Peter’s eyes were opened. He changed from calling Him “Master” to calling Him “Lord.”
Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.
Peter saw an economy of time when Jesus redeems it. They caught more fish in that one day than they had caught before. Even James and John had a boatload. They could take two weeks off.
When you are serious about the Lord in your boat, and you let Him do whatever He wants in your boat—on your job, in your school—the Lord will bless your schoolwork and bless your job. He is never a debtor to somebody who lends Him a boat.
He is Jehovah Jireh. You have to discover that. If you are a cheapskate, you still have not.
Jesus is not merely Jehovah Jireh for other people. He is your Jehovah Jireh. This was a transforming moment for Peter.
In Peter’s boat, we see consecration with four elements:
That is consecration. We love that term because it sounds so nice in the ideal. But consecration usually takes place in a crisis.
It is not usually when you get off by yourself and have some wonderful experience with the Lord. Often it is in the middle of job problems, after losing a job, in health problems, or in family problems, that the Lord says, “Can I get in your boat?”
You may say, “No, no, Lord, wait until I clear this up. I have things to do.” Or perhaps you say, “Yes, Lord, come in the boat.” Then watch what He does.
There is an economy of effort in what He does that changes our lives. Consecration does not necessarily demand that you leave your boat and become merely sacred. How about letting Jesus collapse sacred and secular in your job, and being His seven days a week?
How about praying for your employees? How about consecrating the difficult situation with your difficult coworker to the Lord, rather than running away from it and jumping into another boat?
Jesus wants to reveal Himself to us as He did to Peter, through wonderful experiences in life. Then He makes us better fishermen for men.
Jesus said to Peter, “From now on you will fish for men.” Brothers and sisters, we need to get honest about this. We need to learn how to redeem the time when it comes to fishing for men.
The enemy has encroached, and we have become afraid. A couple of weeks ago, September 11 came around, as it does every year. There was an article in The New York Times about a Mennonite group that comes down from New England every September 11.
Since 2001, they have come to a park, sung hymns, handed out tracts, and offered hope and counseling. They stay there all day because they want to minister to New York City.
They said the people in New York are much less friendly toward Christians now than they were fourteen years ago.
There is an encroachment coming. Things will not always be daylight, when we can share the gospel freely. But are we willing?
Maybe we are throwing our nets on the wrong side of the boat. Maybe we are not beseeching the Lord of the harvest before we go. But whatever the situation, do we have the compassion the Lord had for His people—a compassion that led to prayer to the Lord of the harvest, and then to a harvest of many souls?
Colossians 4 is speaking specifically about our witnessing. I cannot believe that we should simply stand still and let darkness close in, close in, close in.
Every time darkness closes in, it steals some of our children. Even if you are too strong to be swayed, the world comes in and grabs some of our children. There has got to be some standing.
Awake, O sleeper.
Rise from the dead.
Let Christ shine on you.
Jesus revealed Himself to Peter when He fed the five thousand. Peter learned that Jesus is the Bread of Life.
When everybody wanted to leave, Peter said:
Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.
Every time a crisis came, Peter said, “No, I have got to stay. I see something in You. You are the words of life that I need. Where else can I go?”
Then they went up to Caesarea Philippi. The times were changing. For Jesus’ ministry, popularity became criticism, criticism became opposition, and Jesus began spending more time with the disciples.
In Luke 9, when Jesus came to Caesarea Philippi, He prayed. After He prayed, He asked the disciples, “Who do men say that I am?”
The Lord was after something. He knew the disciples had seen the contrast between His ministry and anything that had gone before. But did they see who He was?
After they gave their answers, He asked, “But who do you say that I am?”
Peter saw two amazing things:
You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.
That was tremendous revelation. Jesus was so happy. He said, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona. Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”
The Father wants to reveal the Son. The Son cannot reveal the Son. When the Father revealed the Son, the Son was so happy.
Jesus could now release one of His secrets. The Father had a secret: “This is My beloved Son.” Now the Son had a secret: “I am going to build My church.”
This is the will of God in a nutshell: Christ and His church—and He is building it.
Oh, that we could see that again. Has that vision closed down like a fog? Are we living in darkness now? Have we forgotten this primal revelation that leads us into redeeming the time?
It is seeing who Jesus is and seeing His love for the church.
In New York City, brothers and sisters, we are meeting in Manhattan, and we are having trouble with our landlord. We are meeting in two different places. You worry about buildings and places until you forget that we are supposed to preach the gospel and love one another.
We are the church—not any building or apartment. We have to get back to square one. We are the church, and they cannot take that away from us. Even if we cannot meet anywhere in New York City, we are still the church. They cannot take that away.
This revelation is very important when the enemy comes in and encroaches. In China, how many church buildings have been brought to the ground? More than two hundred, perhaps, in Zhejiang Province.
People dependent upon buildings had heart attacks. They had given a lot of money for those buildings. But may those who have lost their buildings and crosses on their buildings realize that the cross is not up there. It is in Christ crucified, who lives within.
It is not that building that is there. We are the church, the people of God. What a wonderful move into light that could be for people in a desperate time.
Then we see Jesus take Peter, James, and John up onto the mountain, where Jesus is revealed in all His glory. The Father wanted to reveal Jesus in all His glory.
While it was going on, Peter, James, and John were asleep. I guess it got too bright, or Moses was talking too loud, or Elijah was saying, “Hallelujah, hallelujah.” Maybe Elijah was Chinese.
Whatever it was, it woke them up. And it was Peter: “Ooh, ooh, ooh. Let us build three shrines. Let us stay up here. This is so wonderful—Moses, Elijah, Jesus. Let us build three houses.”
That is Peter. His self is always executing something. He is a general without a commission. Of course, it says he had no idea what he was saying.
How did the Lord respond? It was the Father in heaven who responded. This was the first time Peter heard it. In 2 Peter, he records it:
We were eyewitnesses of His majesty.
For when He received honor and glory from God the Father,
such an utterance as this was made to Him by the Majestic Glory:
“This is My beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased.”
When you hear the Father say that about Jesus, you never forget it. I hope you have heard sometime what the Father thinks about the Son. He has His own opinion, you know. It is quite high.
Peter said, “I have never forgotten it. The things I am telling you, I have not made them up. I was there in the majestic glory when I heard God say, ‘This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.’”
That settled it for Peter. No more Moses, no more Elijah—Jesus only. “That is who I am going with.” He saw these wonderful things.
I wish I did not have to move to part three, but unfortunately we have to see that Peter never learned to get out of the way.
After seeing the contrast, and even seeing the Lord by revelation, there were things Peter did that we could overlook. He was always eager, always making decisions and reacting. He wasted time. But he loved the Lord.
Still, something was blocking him.
He saw two revelations at Caesarea Philippi: Jesus and the church. But he missed the third one. Jesus said, “Here is the way I am going to build the church. I have to go down to Jerusalem, suffer there, die, and be raised the third day.”
That was His operation. That was how He would build the church.
I do not think we should blame Peter too much. I do not think anybody could understand the cross until Jesus died on the cross. Jesus told them about the cross, but the Bible says they did not understand what He was saying.
It was such a foreign concept that a King would take a kingdom by the cross. It was such a foreign concept that He would reign and rule, redeeming the time by giving His life.
But it is one thing for the flesh to do something foolish, like crawl out of the boat and say, “Let me walk to You on the water.” It is another thing when Peter says, “Lord, You are not going to do that. I will not allow it.”
That is what Peter said when Jesus said, “I am going to Calvary.” That is when Jesus said some of the harshest words He ever said to anyone:
Get behind Me, Satan.
That is what Christians are like when they work out of their logical best minds. For Peter, it was logical. He would protect Jesus. He could whisk Him away. They could live in Tyre and Sidon or somewhere.
Peter would not allow the Lord to do it. “Lord, You are being foolish.” Peter always knew what he was doing. But Peter did not know the purpose and plan of eternal salvation.
His natural mind could not understand it. Yet he stood in the way, and the Lord had to say, “Get behind Me, Satan.” See what a hindrance the self-life can be.
Peter said, “I will never deny You, Lord,” and then he denied Him. In the garden, as he watched them take Jesus away, the servant girls came up to him and he denied the Lord.
At the end, he even cursed and said, “I do not know this man, Jesus.”
That is when Jesus looked at him. Peter realized, “What a wretch I am. What a betrayer I am. Who did I think I was? How did I think I could stand so tall?”
He was brave enough to cut off Malchus’s ear. But all the disciples could have been killed because of that. That is how foolhardy human ideas and reactions can be.
If Jesus had not immediately healed that ear and said, “Peter, put that sword away. This is My cup. Back off. Once again, you are in the way,” what might have happened?
Peter had to come to the end of himself. He had a difficult time. When he went out and wept bitterly, he knew he was undone.
We will get to part two tomorrow, where Peter learns how to redeem the time. But the wonderful thing was that the first thing Jesus did when He rose from the dead was go to Peter.
The Lord knows what we are like. The Lord knows that we have to be undone. Is that bad news for you?
We need a wake-up call. Awake. We need Christ to shine upon us. Then our selves need to be undone.
Until that happens—until the work of the cross can work in us—we may love the Lord with all our heart, but everything we do may be out of sync with what the Lord wants to do.
There are many servants of God who thought they were doing the Lord’s service, but they were dividing and breaking the church in half. We cannot build the church with human strength. This whole matter of the flesh has to be dealt with.
In Peter, it had to be dealt with. The cross is the third element. You can see it now in that little song:
Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead.
It is no longer I, but Christ who lives in me.
And Christ will shine upon you.
Peter was awakened. Peter saw who Christ was. Next time, by the grace of God, he came to the place where he could redeem the time, as the Lord dealt with his flesh and allowed him to live by the Spirit of the living God.
May the Lord help us in these last days to realize that we are living in prophetic times. Let us seize these times for the Lord’s purpose and will.
Our Lord, we thank You so much for how much You loved Peter. It is such a comfort to me, Lord, because I know how much like Peter I can be—so stubborn, so opinionated, making so many decisions without Your help.
Oh Lord, I pray that You would help us all to learn how to truly be Your disciples. Wake us up where we are asleep concerning the vital matters of Your ministry and Your will.
Reveal Jesus to us, that out of that revelation and vision we might walk and do Your will and not waste time.
Then, Lord, deal with our self-life that always seems to get in the way. Oh Lord, we ask for Your mercy. Please help us. In Jesus’ name we pray.