Occasionally I make some very important realizations about my life. Sometimes someone says something to me that sets off some line of thought that seems completely random at the time, but turns into something significant to me.
There are other times when it seems like a boulder just gets
dropped on me out of a clear blue sky, and I have no choice but to drop
whatever I’m doing and deal with it.
Regardless of how they come to me they are usually things that in
retrospect are pretty obvious. They were
there all along but I simply never noticed them. This was one of those things.
I realized one day that even the mere presence of Christ
will change anything.
I think the apostle Peter was familiar with what I am
talking about.
In John chapter 21 Peter is dealing with the aftermath of
the Crucifixion. He has no hope. The one he gave everything to is dead. With the death of his future he returns to
his past.
“I am going out to fish.”
He trudges down the beach and begins to run the strands of
the nets he hasn’t touched for three years listlessly through his fingers. Before Christ (B.C.) this was what he always
did. Up until he’d heard those two
fateful words “Follow
In the intervening years he saw the dead raised to life,
water turned to wine, and lepers healed.
One miracle after another had been performed in his presence. The Pharisees and Sadducees, the powers of
his society, had been repeatedly challenged and shown to be the greatest of
hypocrites. The foundations of his life
have been completely changed. But even
with all these things the greatest change is what has happened within.
Peter made the sacrifice of believing in someone other than
himself.
In moving the focus of his belief he had done things at the
request of He in whom he believed, and he did it regardless of his own agreement. In so many ways his motivation has been to
satisfy his own dreams, but now he comes to understand the root of his
problem. Belief in someone other than
yourself is only half of the process.
The other half demands blind dependence.
Peter believed in someone else, but he believed in Him because he
thought the other would accomplish Peter’s own desires. So belief is one thing, but devotion requires
taking on the beliefs and desires of the object of your belief as your
own. Peter, as is often the case in my
own life, had not done this.
Now, without Christ, he seems to have lost it all. Having believed in someone else, yet still
applying his own conditions for believing, making Jesus merely a vehicle to
reach his own goals, he has not only lost everything, but he has failed himself
as well as Jesus.
Imagine climbing in the boat and setting the oars, using
muscles gone stiff after years of inactivity and thinking all I can do is fish.
Without purpose, without Jesus, he simply went back to what
he knew. The problem was that now,
having known the ultimate reason for existence, this basic fundamental task
could no longer provide any meaning to what was left of his life.
Into this situation Jesus becomes Present to him.
He becomes the Truth.
“Throw your nets on the other side of the boat.”
Only a slight change from what he’d been doing just moments
before. At this point he hadn’t yet
realized that it was Jesus who was speaking to him, but he did it anyway. What do you suppose he thought at that moment? The local fishing industry hadn’t changed in the
time he had been away from it. He knew
what he was doing, but there on the shore is some side-line fisherman who tells
him to throw the net on the other side of the boat? He knows there aren’t going to be any more
fish on one side than the other. Still,
he does it. His pain is such that he
needs something to fill the time. He
needs something to fill the hole left by the absence of his Rabbi.
What did he have to lose?
He was just fishing after all. When
the nets began to fill and as the individual strands began to break as one fish
upon another threw themselves into the net he realized something had
changed. It was the change that caused
him to realize that the voice he’d heard just a moment ago was the same one
he’d heard agonizing in prayer in the garden at
It was then that he realized just how much the presence of
Christ changes the meaning of everything
we do.
He was only doing what he had always done, but it would
never be the same for him again.
As a result of Christ’s birth, the properties of giving
birth changed. When a baby entered into
the world from the womb it was something that had happened countless times
before. Christ was born as every child
had been born, and yet His birth was
the one that negated the cause of the
mother’s pain. His birth gave meaning to
it. The betrayal of trust that occurred
in
Even the act of crucifixion was changed.
The Romans had been crucifying criminals for quite some time
before Christ walked the Via Dolorosa, and they continued for a long time
afterwards. But with Christ involved it
was more than merely a form of painful execution.
Christ gave it purpose.
His impact and influence was so complete when it happened to
Him that even to unbelievers it was forever after known as The Crucifixion. It is no
longer spoken of even in our day without summoning to our thoughts the name of
Jesus Christ. Pilate would never have
given a second thought to nailing another set of hands to that beam, and in
fact would have willingly given the mob its desire if they had asked for
Barabbas to be killed.
Even Pilate knew somehow that Christ changes everything.
Even he knew that crucifying Christ would have unimaginable ramifications.
Christ was not the first person to be resurrected
either. He himself raised several people
from the dead, but as extraordinary as any resurrection should be considered,
no one ever thinks of them when we say The Resurrection.
No one else was sacrificed first.
Two travelers on the road to Emmaus were just traveling
together until Jesus joined them. When
He spoke they knew He was someone who knew what He was talking about. That simple journey completely altered the
course of their lives, not because of the journey, but because of the One on
the road beside them.
Sad to say that knowing
it is not the same as living it, but
I think Peter, when he made it to shore, had finally figured out the difference
between what he had been doing for the previous three years and what he was
doing now, dripping wet on the shore in front of the living Christ. I think he stood before Christ re-examining
every thought or action he had taken during the last three years knowing that
all of his previous ideas were utterly wrong.
It is one thing to nod your head and smile when someone
says, “I will rise again on the third day after my death.” It is a completely different matter when you
meet Him after He has indeed done what He said He would do.
The thought, “You mean you were serious?!” must have crossed
his mind at some point. Peter suddenly had to believe everything he had only paid
lip service to previously. All of the
things that he had believed for his own benefit now had a completely different
meaning that was no longer based on his own needs and desires. Overthrown oppressors were no longer an issue
when the living Christ was sitting in front of him frying fish on the
seashore! Come to think of it I’ll bet
He even fried fish better! I wonder if
he understood then that after three years with Jesus Christ, without Him Peter
was not after all a better fisherman than before. Without Jesus he was merely the same, but now
he understood what he longed for.
Now he knew what he was missing.
I want to know how Peter remembered that day.
What did the rest of the world look like to him after he
realized that all that Christ said
was true? Could the truth of anything
Christ said be doubted if He could overcome the worst enemy of humanity?
Nope.
Suddenly, he needs to worship Him; to give Him something.
But what do you give to the One who has everything?
Everything.
Everything you are, everything you will be.
Everything you have, and everything you ever had.
Every desire, and every dislike.
Every relationship, and every preconceived notion.
Everything good, and everything bad.
All of it.
Everything.
Because it’s all changed, and He’s the one who did it.
It doesn’t matter whether you want the change or not,
because the creation itself has been fundamentally changed by awaiting His
return. The Expectation with which my
very soul trembles changes how I look at Everything.
And at what cost?
A virgin birth, a crucifixion, a death, a stone rolled away,
a resurrection.
Replace the “A” in the previous sentence with “The” and you
know exactly who is being spoken of without ever saying His name, but then we
say it anyway, because the name of Jesus Christ sounds so much better than any
other words that ever passed our lips before.
And the fact that He
lives changes….
Everything!
©Dan Bode 2007
