Don’t do it man. You will never hear the end of it

I recently saw an online cartoon poster that depicted a duck and a chicken. The duck was about to cross the road when the chicken looked at him and said, “Don’t do it man – you will never hear the end of it!” I hope that makes sense to you! 

Whether it did or not, it brought to my mind the apostle Peter and the night he denied Jesus. Stay with me now, to the end of this article. Peter found himself in a pressure-cooker situation. Matthew 26:57-68 reports after Jesus was arrested by Jewish authorities, they put Him on “trial” and subjected Him to perjury as well as physical abuse and torture. But Jesus was not the only one who underwent a “trial” that night.  Matthew 26:58, 69-75 reports that Peter’s faith was tried to the point it

(temporarily) broke. Following Jesus’ arrest Peter “followed Him [Jesus] at a distance to the high priest’s courtyard.” There he mingled with foes of Jesus and sat around a fire outside the high priest’s palace warming himself (Mark 14:54; Luke 22:55; John 18:15, 25). But it doesn’t take the devil long to turn up the heat on a child of God, and soon the heat got red- hot for Peter – not from the fire, but from people around him! In rapid-fire sequence, from verses 69 to 74, Peter is challenged three times: "You also were with Jesus of Galilee,” and each time Peter emphatically “denied it before them all, saying, ‘I do not know what you are saying.’ ” Before the sad episode ends, Peter even “began to curse and swear, saying, ‘I do not know the Man.’ ” After the third denial, Matthew says, “Immediately a rooster crowed. And Peter remembered the  word of Jesus who had said to him, ‘Before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times’ “ (Matthew 26:34). The account ends with telling words, “Then he [Peter] went out and wept bitterly” (26:34, 74b-75) – choking and sobbing from a smothering sense of shame and failure.

This is where the comment from the chicken cartoon mentioned above comes into play – “Don’t do it man. You will never hear the end of it.” I know we have let Peter hear the end of his failures. We know he repented, and that a few weeks after his shameful failure he stood boldly (with the other apostles) in Acts 2:14ff and fearlessly proclaimed the Christ he earlier denied. He wrote the beautiful and power-packed letters of 1 and 2 Peter. But I can’t help wondering, if Peter was like a lot of us who seriously fail and fall, how long it took him to forgive himself; to stop hearing the voice of the “Devil and Satan . . . the accuser of our brethren”

(Revelation 12:9-10) inside his own heart and head telling him he’s not fit to be an apostle, that his sin was so egregious that God will not forgive him. I don’t know. I do know that, regarding his sin, what he needed to do more than anything else after repenting was to remember . . . to forget!

Here is some soul-healing news: when we obey the gospel and are baptized into Christ, or when we repent, confess and pray for God’s forgiveness as an erring Christian – God Himself declares, “I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and lawless deeds I will remember no more” (Hebrews 8:12). Some people may never let you hear the end of it if you fail. But, if you repent, God will. And if God remembers to forgive and forget your sins, how can it not be okay for you to work on doing the same thing? Have you failed Christ badly, even repeatedly?

Repent – and then try to remember . . . to forget!

Dan Gulley, Smithville, TN