Failures guide. Blunders cry out information. —William Stafford

Crowing roosters never left the region. Each morning the rest of his life, Peter awoke from his sleep to a squawking alarm.

Paul would experience his own devilish messenger sent to thorn-taunt him. But unlike Paul’s tormentor, Peter’s barn-stoop condemners had flesh and blood. The winged creatures didn’t know that their most instinctive way to help the world could ritually sabotage a once-guilty man.

Like many of us, the apostle Peter was acquainted with failures and their relentless reminders. How did Peter come to believe this grace-truth that failure isn’t final, that a failed Christian isn’t a finished Christian?

Learning His Love Again

This question knocks at my door each night as I speak reminding words amid forehead kisses to my 3-year-old.

“You are a loved boy,” I say.

“Yes!” he says with assurance. “I am a loved boy!”

I marvel at his confident acceptance of my love. And yet, why do I marvel? If the little one said to me, “No, Daddy, I am not loved,” my heart would enlarge to defend him from that wretched lie. If he were to feel it too proud to agree that he is loved by me, my heart would enlarge to dissuade him from this thieving view of humility that steals God-given joy from us both.

Why, then, in the presence of my heavenly Father’s love, do I find it so difficult to say, “Yes! I am a loved person.” I think Peter understands.

Failure pokes the tender ribs of memory. Makes us wince. Too many storm-sinking, “you’ll never wash my feet” miscalculations in our faith. Too many “though everyone else forsakes you, I never will” debacles of our pride. Too many “you’ll never go to the cross,” “get behind me, Satan” moments to count. Too many Gethsemane-sword, blood-cut misapplications of zeal. Too many “I tell you I don’t know the man” betrayals and fears. And sometimes the fault isn’t ours but the bruise still swells (Mark 10:35–41).

How then did failed Peter learn that he was a loved man writing to a beloved people (1 Peter 2:11; 4:12)? John tells part of the answer. While Peter huddled near home, throwing his grief like a net into the sea, Jesus “revealed himself in this way” (John 21:1).

How Jesus Reveals Himself

Jesus is like a host who comes in the aftermath of failure with a “This Is Your Life” approach. By the end, Jesus will thread Peter’s life together by saying, “When you were young” and “when you are old” (John 21:18). But here at the beginning, in this way, what Jesus wants Peter to see is Jesus. “Jesus revealed himself again . . . and he revealed himself” (John 21:1). John says it twice in one verse.

“Unknown is enough when on the margins of the world with Jesus.”

What Peter most needs within the bog of his failure isn’t to strain forward to seize the narrative, or to protect his image, or to preserve the brand of the original disciples, or to get back his old platform. Unknown is enough when on the margins of the world with Jesus. This delightful sufficiency signals the first lesson Peter, and any of us who’ve failed, must relearn.

He remembers how you began with him.

This sea of Jesus’s revealing is full of memory for Peter. The smell of boats and fish. The presence of home feels safer here, far from the bitter weeping of Jerusalem.

Where did you grow up? Where in this world do you feel most at home? What might it mean for you that, when you think of those places amid failure, Jesus intends you not to escape them but to remember them again, and this time to see more of him there than you did before?

But wait. Jesus then enacts a bizarre startlement.

Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. (John 21:3)

Haven’t we lived this scene already (Luke 5:1–11)? Yet this is no déjà vu experience. The one who holds all things together orders providence right where the waves lap over the sand-squished toes of Peter and the others, right where they stand.

Do you remember when you and Jesus first met? Why might Jesus bring you that flashlight memory amid the power outage of your failure?

He remembers the scenes of your life with him.

Slowly, Peter recognizes that Jesus is the one behind these ways, and he “threw himself into the sea” (John 21:7). With John’s word choice, we can barely forget an earlier Peter, the boat, a water-walk (Matthew 14:22–36). Do you remember acts of faith that caused you to step out toward Jesus, when you were in over your head and he rescued you?

Then Jesus breaks bread with fish (John 21:9). How could Peter and the others look at Jesus breaking bread without remembering the earlier wonders (John 6:1–14; Luke 24:35)? Do you remember such moments of startling wonder, years ago, with Jesus?

The charcoal fire burns more certain. It waits for Peter as he high-knee splashes toward Jesus (John 21:9). The Greek word for charcoal fire occurs in only one other place (John 18:18), when Peter denied Jesus by that charcoal fire.

Someone else lit the original charcoal fire of betrayal when Jesus and Peter met anguished eyes (Luke 22:61). But this fire, Jesus prepared. Jesus’s and Peter’s eyes must meet again.

What if, after these grace-reminders of our beginnings and life memories with Jesus, the only way to go forward is to face Jesus again by the charcoal fire? Tempted to recover without this step, what we most want is the denial or removal of the rooster and the charcoal blaze. But what if what we most need is the grace-learned strength to see more of Jesus than we do of them, like one who learns to regard the moon more than the shadows lurking beneath its glow?

What if Jesus reveals himself in this way?

He remembers your name.

Now Jesus does something so subtle we often overlook it. Jesus calls Peter by his birth name. “Simon, son of John” (John 21:15).

This must have startled Peter. How long had it been since Peter heard “Simon, son of John” on Jesus’s lips? Two or three years?

I’m “Zack, son of Vern and Jan.” What’s your name — the name you had when you were a child and helpless in the world? What is your experience with your family, for better and worse?

Why do we in our failures need to come to terms with our pre-ministry name and see it in relation to Jesus again?

Love is his question for you.

With your life remembered and your name spoken, now comes the one question three times (John 21:15–17).

Not, “Peter, do you believe me? Will you go all out for the gospel for me?” Not, “Peter, will you leverage a platform for me? Or promise never to fail me again?” Not, “Peter, will you get to work, take back the ministry you once had, and prove your detractors wrong?” But, “Peter, do you love me?”

In this way, Jesus reveals himself.

Do you notice the hurt, tethered to love, that Jesus lets us feel (John 21:17)? After all, disordered love was the untended leak that ultimately sank our boat.

There is no “feed my sheep” without first coming to terms with where you are from, how you and Jesus met, the wonder and the needed rescues of his being with you, what your name is, the charcoal-fire sins, and the condition of love in your soul. Search committees, media opportunists, and relatives may not approach you in this way. But Jesus does.

Do you find Jesus more lovely and preferable to anything else you need or want? Peter says yes and means it.

A new call can’t save us.

Yet, a fly buzzes around Peter’s head and distracts him. As it turns out, restoring Peter from failure doesn’t remove Peter’s ability to fail (see also Galatians 2:11–14).

“But what about John?” Peter asks (John 21:20–23). Peter is like a dog easily unhinged into chase by a squirrel. Though in the loving presence of your Master, is there someone you regularly snap your collar to chase?

“If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?” Jesus says (John 21:22).

“As it turns out, restoring Peter from failure doesn’t remove Peter’s ability to fail.”

At that, Jesus takes Peter back to basics. “Follow me” (John 21:22). Jesus said this to Peter years prior, but the grace-need Peter had then hasn’t subsided.

Even forgiven people can repeat what breaks them. Roosters are rarely one-morning creatures. So, Jesus repeats his call with pointed exclamation. “You follow me!”

How did failed Peter learn that he was a loved person writing to a beloved people?

In this way.

Redeemed Voices of the Failed

Humble yourselves. . . . Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him . . . (1 Peter 5:6, 8–9)

Words like these aren’t spoken from new-shoe theologians, barely worn God-talkers who walk with no scuff and teach with no gravel scrapes on their soles. Peter speaks as one thrashed firsthand by the roaring, clawed devil.

Unlike some who’ve failed, Peter owned what he did. He bitter-wept for the cuss he became and caused. We need such redeemed voices of the failed. These broken sages know of Jesus by creed, yes, but also by cries.

So, when an ant colony of condemnation breaks open into a torrent of flash-flood crawlers creeping all over you, you can holler and jump, flick and cuss, run and scratch, but only Jesus knows the way to relieve you.

When you’ve mud-stepped into the muck, you are never minefield abandoned. Stop where you are. Let go of trying to tell us it’s not that bad. There is One among the mines who knows how to guide you home, wash you clean, make you safe.

How can the failed like Peter overcome the condemning crow?

In this way.

Audio Transcript

We’re in our tenth year on the podcast, coming up on 1,800 episodes in the archive. And over the course of that decade, we’ve covered a lot of different topics. And that includes the topic of birth control, or, better, conception control. It’s arisen three times on the podcast, in three episodes 230, 552, and 1347. The most recent being three years ago. But today we have a follow-up question, built off something you said on the podcast seven years ago, Pastor John. Here it is, from an anonymous wife and mother.

“Hello Pastor John, and thank you for taking my question. Here’s the context. My husband and I have two wonderful boys. I believe our family is complete. He does, too. We have each independently decided that two children is enough. I’ve asked my husband to consider a vasectomy. He’s interested, and feels that he is done having children himself, so the potential for children in a re-marriage, if death were to end our present marriage, seems to not necessarily factor in here, a very important argument you made in a previous episode. But ultimately my husband is undecided because he’s not sure if God permits such an action. In your view of the Bible, is it okay for a monogamous husband and father of two, who is done having children with me, or any future wife, to get a vasectomy?”

The older I get, the more skeptical I become of the freedom I think I have from being formed by my own culture. Let me put it in another way. The older I get, the more suspicious I become that I am more a child of my historical and cultural circumstances than I once thought I was.

Now, one of the reasons I say this is to help people like this couple not take offense when I wave a yellow flag (not a red flag, but a yellow flag, a big yellow flag) warning us all that when it comes to children and sex and family and personal freedom and comforts, we are almost certainly deeply infected by a contemporary culture that for decades, through television, movies, videos, advertising, books, articles, and podcasts, has shaped our mindset about marriage and children and sex and freedom of the unencumbered self.

None of us comes to the Bible with a blank slate in these matters. We are profoundly shaped by the cultural air we breathe. And that culture (and it’s been this way for a long time) does not rejoice at the blessing of children. It does not gladly embrace the enormous cost and effort of raising children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. It does not see marriage as forming a beautiful, meaningful, lifelong, faith-building, character-forming matrix for growing the next generation.

“Our culture has virtually stripped the pleasures of sex from the place God appointed for them.”

It doesn’t put any value on the pain that inevitably comes with deep covenant commitments to spouses and children, but instead justifies every possible means of minimizing our own personal frustration and pleasure and maximizing personal freedom, whether through postponing marriage, or not having children, or avoiding any kind of commitment, or divorcing in order to get out of an uncomfortable marriage, or neglect of children, sticking them in some kind of institution while we go about our careers.

Our culture has virtually stripped the pleasures of sex from the place God appointed for them, namely woven into the covenant commitments of lifelong marriage. These and dozens of other ways, we are all infected by the spirit of our times. All of that to say, I speak with the kind of trembling that I may be more a child of my times than I wish. I try to be under the Scriptures. I want to be shaped by the Scripture. I want to be counter-cultural in a biblical way. I want to be radical for Jesus, but I know how inevitable it is that I speak from a particular cultural time, place, not to mention my own sinfulness and intellectual limits.

Are Marriage and Children Normative?

So, with that confession, let me just rehearse briefly what I have said more extensively elsewhere. I believe marriage is normative for Christians, normative. It’s normative to be married because Genesis 2:18 says it’s not good for man to be alone.

And because we are so wonderfully designed, I think physically and psychologically, by God to form covenant commitments, consummated in sexual union with the glorious wonder of making and raising babies. Nevertheless, though I believe that’s normative, I can see in the life of Jesus and in the life of the apostle Paul and their teachings, that marriage is not an absolute requirement of Christians, but that for kingdom purposes, for God-centered, Christ-exalting, mission-advancing, church-building, soul-saving, sanctifying purposes, one might choose a life of singleness.

“Children are a great blessing. They are one of the purposes and miracles of sexual union.”

By analogy, I believe having children in marriage is normative. Children are a great blessing. They are one of the purposes and miracles of sexual union. To turn away from procreation in marriage for the sake of some worldly gain rather than being motivated by God-centered, Christ-exalting, kingdom advancement is a sin.

Nevertheless, on the analogy of marriage, just as for kingdom reasons singleness may be chosen, it is possible for Christ’s sake and for holy purposes that limiting the number of children would be chosen also. The principle in both cases, getting married and having children is one of self-denying, Christ-exalting, mission-advancing motivation — what’s your motivation? — rather than simply following the course of the age in order to maximize worldly freedoms and worldly comforts.

Now that puts a huge burden on all of us to honestly know our own hearts, doesn’t it? Search me oh God and know my thoughts and see if there be any wicked way in me governing these choices. This must be our cry because we are also prone to come up with a theology and an ethics that justify our desires. So, I think you can see in these observations that I don’t regard all birth control, or better conception control, as sinful.

Using abortifacients that kill a conceived child would be sin. But choosing not to conceive may not be a sin, which means that the methods and the timing of such choices will become a matter of biblically and medically-informed wisdom.

Three Questions About the Question

So what would my advice be that might contribute to the wisdom of this couple besides what I’ve tried to say?

Let me pick one sentence from what she wrote. She says, “I’ve asked my husband to consider a vasectomy. He’s interested and feels that he is done having children. So the potential for children in a remarriage, if death were to end our present marriage seems not necessarily to factor in here.” Three questions about that sentence. First, the word feels, he feels that he is done having children.

Feelings are notoriously temporary. And even if she had said, “He thinks that he is done,” I would say the same thing. We just don’t know in such circumstances what may happen in our lives that would make an irreversible sterilization tragic.

Second question. The word “seems.” She says the potential for children in a remarriage if death were to end our present marriage “seems not to necessarily factor in here.” Seems is a pretty weak word. Death is a real possibility in a marriage, and in that case, remarriage would be both likely and I think good. How does he know what his heart would say in that new marriage? How does he know? “It seems that it may not be a factor.” Well, that’s pretty flimsy.

Third, nothing is said about the wife in that possible new marriage. Seems like he would be only taking into account his own preferences about whether he would want children in that new marriage. What about hers? And be careful about assuming that you’re too old to become a parent. Noel and I adopted when I was 50. What if a 50-year-old man marries a 35-year-old single woman who has always dreamed of giving birth to her own child?

Plead with God for Guidance

So my fallible contribution to your effort to act biblically — and I admire you for it — and to act wisely is to simply say one, search your hearts so that your decision to have no more children is a Christ-honoring decision, a mission-advancing decision.

Second, be very slow to implement that decision with a kind of sterilization that would cut off godly future possibilities which you cannot presently see.

And maybe just one other word of counsel. Sit down together and open your Bible and read the first 12 verses of Psalm 25. I say that because I don’t know any other passage of Scripture that is better for putting into word words our cry for guidance and wisdom from God.

Audio Transcript

We close the week on this Friday looking forward to our next sermons, Sunday morning. This is because, in just about every Bible text, we face unanswerable questions, things we simply don’t know. So, what do preachers and teachers do with those uncertainties? Do we take creative license? Do we guess and make up things? Do we speculate? Or do we just tell people that we don’t know? It’s a great practical question from Mark who lives in Montana.

“Dear Pastor John, hello! Jesus tells us in John 12:49, ‘I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment — what to say and what to speak.’ And we trust that ‘all Scripture is breathed out by God’ (2 Timothy 3:16). So, I have long struggled with how much embellishment and speculation we should bring into the pulpit. Scripture does not include every possible detail for us. And the church through the ages has, in many cases, tried to fill in these gaps. Commentaries frequently say things like ‘this may refer to.’ Or they use qualifiers like ‘possibly’ and ‘probably’ to explain meanings that are uncertain. So, here’s my question. Is it okay for teachers and preachers to conjecture about what the Bible doesn’t say? How much speculation should we bring into our sermons?”

Well, let’s start with the easy part.

Preachers Must Tell the Truth

A pastor, a preacher, above all things, should be honest. If he’s not honest, none of his other qualities — not even his faith or his love — will count for anything because the people simply won’t be able to trust him. They won’t be able to trust that he has faith or trust that he really loves them. A dishonest pastor can’t make up for dishonesty by other virtues because it’s foundational, and it’s foundational because truth is foundational. Honesty means telling the truth. Preachers must tell the truth.

“A preacher, above all things, should be honest.”

And what that means here in the context of this question is that he can’t say he knows what he doesn’t know. It would be a lie, and God won’t honor that. In other words, if he’s not sure what a word or a phrase or a sentence in the sermon text means, he must not say he is sure what it means.

So, the first principle of how much uncertainty you admit into a sermon is that you admit as much as you must in order to be honest with what the people need to know. Now, that doesn’t mean that you need to mention every single thing you don’t know — that would take way too long. The problem is not that there are many things we preachers don’t understand and won’t understand until Jesus comes. That’s not the problem. That’s true of all preachers. The problem is with stating as true what you don’t know to be true.

Now, that’s the easy part.

Honesty in Interpretation

Mark is asking not mainly about presenting speculations as true, which is dishonest, but about presenting speculations at all. That’s more complicated. And even though you don’t have to tell your people every Sunday everything you don’t know about the text, you probably will have to tell them some things you don’t know about the text.

“Over time, we will lose the trust of our people if we are constantly skipping difficult sentences.”

At least, if your people have grown to expect that you are a faithful expositor, and you don’t skip over hard things just because they’re hard, then they’ll want to know what your explanation is for the next sentence in the biblical text. And you might skip some things because you’re dealing with some large text, say, and you can’t touch on everything. But over time, we will lose the trust of our people if we are constantly skipping difficult sentences because we’re not sure what they mean.

So, what do you do? If you see something in the text and you’re not sure what it means — some words, some phrase, some logic — what do you do? You tell people honestly that you’re not sure what this word or phrase or logic or situation means. Then you tell them what you think it means, and you give them the reasons why you think what you do that they can see in the text.

And then you tell them one or two of the other possible understandings and why you don’t lean toward them. And then, if you can, you show them elsewhere in the Bible that these two or three alternative interpretations are all true to reality. They’re true to reality, even though you’re not sure which of those realities is being referred to in this text. In other words, you’re not going to say that one of the possible interpretations is contradictory to the reality that other passages in the Bible clearly teach. You’re not going to fault the Bible as contradictory. You’re going to give your people the possible interpretations, which in fact could be true given what is taught elsewhere in the Bible.

Emissaries of Infallible Truth

Now, there’s one other angle on this issue of bringing speculation into Christian preaching that I want to mention. And I think Mark is getting at this in one of his concerns as well.

It has to do with the use that preachers make of sociological, or philosophical, or psychological, or even canonical backgrounds to what the text says, which may or may not be the case. And it’s not obvious from the text. So a preacher might say, “Paul got this emphasis from the stoic philosophers, and then he Christianized it.” Maybe, maybe not. Or they might say that such and such a paragraph is an early Christian hymn. Well, maybe, maybe not. Or they might say that Paul was fond of attending the Olympic games. Well, maybe, maybe not. Or they might speculate that Paul was a widower, or they might venture that he was a type-A personality and would be an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs. Or they might say that every reference to the Son of Man is an allusion to Daniel 7.

Now, my guess is that what’s going on in some preaching is that the preacher has ceased to think of himself as an accountable emissary of God’s infallible truth, whose job is to call people to believe things for which they’re willing to risk their lives. And instead, he’s fallen into the pattern — a kind of academic pattern or public-communicator pattern — of seeing himself as an interesting communicator who needs to hold people’s attention with fascinating details that may or may not be the case.

They Come to Hear God

So, my closing warning would be this: to the degree that a preacher builds his sermons with materials that people cannot see for themselves in the Bible, to that degree he loses authority, and he loses the power to build faith, and he has passed over into entertainment — even theologically rich entertainment, canonically captivating entertainment, which he thinks the people will find interesting, fascinating, intriguing, whether they see it in the text or not.

In fact, one of the yellow flags that I spot in preaching is when the pastor says, “Well, I find it intriguing that . . .” and then he gives me an interesting twist on the text with no support that I can build my life on. And I want to stand up and shout — I never have, but maybe I will — “We’re not here to learn what you find intriguing, Mr. Pastor. We have come to hear the word of God. Tell us what God has to say to us, and if you don’t know, tell us you don’t know. And then go back to your study and get on your knees over your books and your Bible, and wrestle until your hip is out of joint. And then when you’ve got a message from God, bring it to us and we will be very, very thankful.”