“Cage of Guilt”
from the book “Wild Goose Chase” by Mark Batterson
Sunday, November 7, 2010: Luke 22:31-34
Introduction: I’m loving this series on The Wild Goose Chase; I hope you are as well! If you’re anything like me, you love success stories. I think they are motivating, I think they are inspiring. But I’m going to be honest with you, because of my sinful nature, there are times when I actually feel good about hearing a story of failure. Why is this? I have asked myself this question, and I realize it is because when someone fails, I feel better about myself because it wasn’t me who failed. I know that is bad, but if most people were honest, at times they have felt good when they have heard about the failures of others. THAT IS BECAUSE WE TEND TO COMPARE OURSELVES TO OTHERS!
This morning we are looking at the disciple Peter. Peter is this guy who, when you’re feeling bad about yourself, it can be encouraging to look at his early life as a disciple. Peter will be used powerfully by God in the end, but he makes many mistakes along the way. So, let’s take some time to look at Peter and see what we can learn from him through his guilt, and his breaking free with Jesus’ help.
I. Peter’s Boldness- (Luke 22:31-34)
a. Conditioned responses- In Luke 22:31 Jesus is telling Simon Peter:
“Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you Simon, that your faith may not fail, and when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” But Peter replied, (and you have got to love how Peter speaks with boldness and confidence): “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.” Jesus answered, “I tell you, Peter, before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times, deny that you even know me.”
Story: Around the turn of the 19th century, a Russian psychologist and physician named Ivan Pavlov did some groundbreaking studies that won him a Nobel Prize. The study was that dogs naturally salivate to food. The truth is, many humans do as well. But Pavlov wanted to see if salivation could be caused by another stimulus and as you may recall from a high school Science class, Pavlov conditioned the dogs by ringing a bell and then feeding them their food. Eventually, the ringing bell, even without the food, would cause salivation. And Pavlov referred to this learned relationship as a conditioned reflex.
If you were to think about it, there is something that you have been conditioned to, that will cause you to salivate. It exists in your life, you’re just not aware of it. Maybe it is passing by a donut shop; maybe it is the name of a type of food; for me, when I hear about Double Blueberry Cream pie at Marie Calendars, I start to salivate for the taste! To one degree or another, all of us are Pavlovian. We’ve been consciously or subconsciously conditioned our entire lives and much of our behavior is dictated by these conditioned reflexes.
Over the course of our lifetime we acquire an elaborate repertoire of conditioned reflexes. Some of them are minor idiosyncrasies, like a nervous laugh or a half-smile or a twitch. Others become major personality traits. I think a critical personality is often born out of psychological insecurity: we criticize in others what we don’t like about ourselves. Some conditioned reflexes are as normal and as natural as a blush, others are as destructive as drinking to drown your sorrow. But big or small, conscious or subconscious, harmless or harmful, one thing is certain, we are far more conditioned than we realize.
b. Allowing God to recondition us- Part of our spiritual growth is
being able to recognize how we’ve been conditioned and allow God to recondition us. A familiar pattern of speaking for Jesus was: “You have heard that it was said, but I tell you…” This is Jesus’ way of trying to recondition us. The ‘you have heard that it was said,’ is Jesus reminding the people of what they have been taught and what they believe.” The ‘but I tell you,’ is Jesus getting ready to teach them what they need to understand as God’s truth; how God would have them to live. So in His teaching, in His reconditioning of us, Jesus tells us to ‘turn the other cheek,’ and ‘go the extra mile,’ and ‘pray for those who persecute you,’ and ‘love your enemy.’ These are not natural reactions for us, we must be reconditioned so that we might live how God wants us to live.
Now let me turn our attention to “guilt,” because today we are talking specifically about the cage of guilt and how being in this trap, in this cage, keeps us from living the spiritual adventure and the Wild Goose chase. When we sin, GUILT IS ACTUALLY A HEALTHY AND HOLY EXPERIENCE. Thank God for the conviction of the Wild Goose; thank God for how He gives this response to you. It is God, in essence saying to us: “I love you enough that I’m not going to let you hurt yourself, I’m going to convict you, I’m going to prompt you in a way so that you know that what you are about to do or what you have done is going to take you to the wrong place and eventually you are going to become who you don’t want to be.”
So thank God for the conviction of the Holy Spirit. However, some of our conditioned reflexes are like these psychological straight jackets that immobilize us emotionally or relationally or spiritually. I think false guilt is a great example of this. The moment we confess our sin to God, our sin is not just forgiven, it is forgotten. Isn’t that wonderful?! When was the last time you said, “God thank you that your grace is enough, that your grace is sufficient.” For most of us, it is far easier for us to accept God’s forgiveness than it is for us to forgive ourselves. Why? Because we can forgive, but we can’t forget. And if we don’t allow the grace of God to really saturate and sanctify our sinful memory, then at this point we experience false guilt. False guilt comes when we have confessed our sin, but we haven’t forgiven ourselves, and we don’t forget what we have done. False guilt causes us to punish ourselves again and again. We become so fixated on past mistakes that we forfeit future opportunities. We mistakenly think that our sins disqualify us from God using us and what happens is this, our feelings of guilt become the cage that keeps up from chasing the Wild Goose.
II. Jesus Loves Us Out of Our Cage- (Luke 22:54-62; Romans 5:8)
a. Peter in the cage of guilt- Let’s go back to Peter, and see how Peter
ends up in this cage of guilt. Listen to Luke 22:54-62, “Then seizing him, they led Jesus away and took Him into the house of the high priest. Peter followed at a distance but when they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and had sat down together, Peter sat down with them. A servant girl saw him seated there in the firelight. She looked closely at him and said, ‘This man was with him.’ But he denied it. ‘Woman, I don’t know him,’ he said.”
Now let’s stop for a moment to make an observation: Peter really gets a bum rap here, because even though he denies knowing Jesus, he is there by Jesus. Where are all the other disciples? None of them got close enough to get caught. Continuing… “ A little later someone else saw him and said, ‘You also are one of them.’ ‘Man, I am not!’ Peter replied. About an hour later another asserted, ‘Certainly this fellow was with him, for he is a Galilean.’ Peter replied, ‘Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Just as he was speaking, the rooster crowed. The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him: ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will disown me three times.’ And Peter went outside and wept bitterly.”
I’ll tell you what, looking at Scripture through the lens of Ivan Pavlov is an interesting exercise and Peter makes an interesting case study. I have read this story countless times, but it wasn’t until I was reading over this series, and the words of Mark Batterson, that he helped me to think about this: How do you think Peter reacted the rest of his life each time he heard a rooster crow? I would imagine that every time a rooster crowed, it took him back to these feelings of guilt and reminded him of how he denied Jesus three times in Jesus’ greatest moment of need. Every time a rooster crowed, it put Peter right back in the cage of guilt.
This story, and this cage, should remind us of a tactic that hasn’t changed since the Garden of Eden. I’ll tell you exactly what the enemy wants to do, he wants to remind you of what you’ve done wrong/ over and over and over again, and then he wants to remind you again and again and again, because he wants you to live in the cage of guilt, wants to, in a sense, condition your spiritual reflexes with guilt. He wants to hurl accusations at you. And Jesus came to recondition our spiritual reflexes with His grace so that we are no longer reactionaries, but rather revolutionaries for His cause. Not living in the cage of guilt but living this spiritual adventure that He called us to.
b. Leading us out of the cage- Let me point out to you one little
sentence in this passage that is easy to overlook, but it is there for a reason: the sentence is, ‘At that moment, the Lord turned and looked straight at Peter.’ Have you ever noticed that sentence? It’s almost there as a footnote in the text but I think it speaks volumes. The split second after Peter denies knowing Jesus, Jesus looks straight at him and makes eye contact. I don’t think it was a look of condemnation, because we just read how Jesus told Peter he would deny Jesus three times. Jesus not only knew that Peter would deny Him three times, but He also KNEW that Peter would beat himself up over this. Jesus knew that this could cause Peter to give up on Himself, but Jesus would never give up on Peter.
Eye contact is a powerful thing. Turn and look for a moment at the person next to you. Look them in the eye, Okay, look back up here. When you look someone in the eye there will be different feelings. Right now it probably was very uncomfortable because this isn’t what you would normally do. If you look at your spouse in the eye, it often is an intimate and close feeling. When you look someone in the eye, there is a connection. If you look at your children in the eyes when they have done something wrong, it is convicting for them. When Jesus looks Peter in the eyes, I think it is a look of love. Jesus is trying to show Peter LOVE in what would become one of Peter’s lowest times in his life. In essence, Jesus was saying with this look: “Peter, look at me. Look at me. I forgave you before you even denied me. I just want you to know I haven’t given up on you. We are still in this thing together.”
I’m not sure what mistakes you’ve made. I don’t know what sinful memories are etched into your brain. I have no ideas what failures form that cage of guilt in your life, but I do know this — God hasn’t given up on you. It is not in God’s nature to give up on you, and God doesn’t want you to give up on yourself. I think at a very fundamental level, if you can grasp this spiritual truth, you are going to be ok. Those times in our lives when we fail so badly that we feel absolutely unworthy to receive the grace of God is the time when we need most to look in the eyes of Jesus, and like Peter, see that look of love gazing back at us!
Jesus loves us with an incredible grace. As Romans 5:8 tells us: “For God showed His love for us in this, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” God doesn’t wait until we get our act together before He starts showing us love. When we are at our worst, God is at His best.
Conclusion: I’ve preached a couple of times on how this story has ended, So let me recap for you. After Jesus has been resurrected, Peter has gone fishing. Jesus appears to Peter, and has a lunch with Peter. Three times during the lunch Jesus asks Peter: “Do you love me?” Three times Peter tells Jesus that he does. I truly believe that this was Jesus’ way of restoring Peter to ministry, and of letting Peter say “I’m sorry Jesus for denying You.” I believe it is Jesus telling Peter that He believes in Him, and for Him to go back to “fishing for men.”
Imagine the adventure that Peter would have missed out on if he had given up on himself, or thought that God had given up on him. The places he went, the people he met, the things he did, the miracles that God did through him, what a life of spiritual adventure. There was a moment he could have gone back in the cage of guilt and lived there forever, but he didn’t do that, and I think it is because of what Jesus does.
Jesus knew something about conditioned reflexes before Ivan Pavlov came along. Peter failed three times, Jesus reconditioned him three times. But that’s not all that took place: in John 21:4, we are told that this all happened right after daybreak; or right after the rooster crowed. Jesus’ timing was purposeful. Jesus wanted to break Peter of his conditioned response, because He knew Peter wouldn’t be free of his cage of guilt until he was. After this, I would imagine that the rooster’s crow no longer brought him feelings of guilt, but rather it was a reminder of God’s grace. Maybe now the rooster’s crow produced feelings of gratitude toward God.
As we share in communion together this morning, let this meal be a reminder of God’s grace, and let this grace break you out of your cage of guilt. Sin minus grace produces guilt. The cage of guilt can capture us at any time, But with this communion meal, Jesus asks us: “Do you love me.” And by partaking of the meal together, we are telling Jesus, ‘Yes, I love you.” And Jesus tells us, be free of your guilt, and live the spiritual adventure. Amen.
from the book “Wild Goose Chase” by Mark Batterson
Sunday, November 7, 2010: Luke 22:31-34
Introduction: I’m loving this series on The Wild Goose Chase; I hope you are as well! If you’re anything like me, you love success stories. I think they are motivating, I think they are inspiring. But I’m going to be honest with you, because of my sinful nature, there are times when I actually feel good about hearing a story of failure. Why is this? I have asked myself this question, and I realize it is because when someone fails, I feel better about myself because it wasn’t me who failed. I know that is bad, but if most people were honest, at times they have felt good when they have heard about the failures of others. THAT IS BECAUSE WE TEND TO COMPARE OURSELVES TO OTHERS!
This morning we are looking at the disciple Peter. Peter is this guy who, when you’re feeling bad about yourself, it can be encouraging to look at his early life as a disciple. Peter will be used powerfully by God in the end, but he makes many mistakes along the way. So, let’s take some time to look at Peter and see what we can learn from him through his guilt, and his breaking free with Jesus’ help.
I. Peter’s Boldness- (Luke 22:31-34)
a. Conditioned responses- In Luke 22:31 Jesus is telling Simon Peter:
“Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you Simon, that your faith may not fail, and when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” But Peter replied, (and you have got to love how Peter speaks with boldness and confidence): “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.” Jesus answered, “I tell you, Peter, before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times, deny that you even know me.”
Story: Around the turn of the 19th century, a Russian psychologist and physician named Ivan Pavlov did some groundbreaking studies that won him a Nobel Prize. The study was that dogs naturally salivate to food. The truth is, many humans do as well. But Pavlov wanted to see if salivation could be caused by another stimulus and as you may recall from a high school Science class, Pavlov conditioned the dogs by ringing a bell and then feeding them their food. Eventually, the ringing bell, even without the food, would cause salivation. And Pavlov referred to this learned relationship as a conditioned reflex.
If you were to think about it, there is something that you have been conditioned to, that will cause you to salivate. It exists in your life, you’re just not aware of it. Maybe it is passing by a donut shop; maybe it is the name of a type of food; for me, when I hear about Double Blueberry Cream pie at Marie Calendars, I start to salivate for the taste! To one degree or another, all of us are Pavlovian. We’ve been consciously or subconsciously conditioned our entire lives and much of our behavior is dictated by these conditioned reflexes.
Over the course of our lifetime we acquire an elaborate repertoire of conditioned reflexes. Some of them are minor idiosyncrasies, like a nervous laugh or a half-smile or a twitch. Others become major personality traits. I think a critical personality is often born out of psychological insecurity: we criticize in others what we don’t like about ourselves. Some conditioned reflexes are as normal and as natural as a blush, others are as destructive as drinking to drown your sorrow. But big or small, conscious or subconscious, harmless or harmful, one thing is certain, we are far more conditioned than we realize.
b. Allowing God to recondition us- Part of our spiritual growth is
being able to recognize how we’ve been conditioned and allow God to recondition us. A familiar pattern of speaking for Jesus was: “You have heard that it was said, but I tell you…” This is Jesus’ way of trying to recondition us. The ‘you have heard that it was said,’ is Jesus reminding the people of what they have been taught and what they believe.” The ‘but I tell you,’ is Jesus getting ready to teach them what they need to understand as God’s truth; how God would have them to live. So in His teaching, in His reconditioning of us, Jesus tells us to ‘turn the other cheek,’ and ‘go the extra mile,’ and ‘pray for those who persecute you,’ and ‘love your enemy.’ These are not natural reactions for us, we must be reconditioned so that we might live how God wants us to live.
Now let me turn our attention to “guilt,” because today we are talking specifically about the cage of guilt and how being in this trap, in this cage, keeps us from living the spiritual adventure and the Wild Goose chase. When we sin, GUILT IS ACTUALLY A HEALTHY AND HOLY EXPERIENCE. Thank God for the conviction of the Wild Goose; thank God for how He gives this response to you. It is God, in essence saying to us: “I love you enough that I’m not going to let you hurt yourself, I’m going to convict you, I’m going to prompt you in a way so that you know that what you are about to do or what you have done is going to take you to the wrong place and eventually you are going to become who you don’t want to be.”
So thank God for the conviction of the Holy Spirit. However, some of our conditioned reflexes are like these psychological straight jackets that immobilize us emotionally or relationally or spiritually. I think false guilt is a great example of this. The moment we confess our sin to God, our sin is not just forgiven, it is forgotten. Isn’t that wonderful?! When was the last time you said, “God thank you that your grace is enough, that your grace is sufficient.” For most of us, it is far easier for us to accept God’s forgiveness than it is for us to forgive ourselves. Why? Because we can forgive, but we can’t forget. And if we don’t allow the grace of God to really saturate and sanctify our sinful memory, then at this point we experience false guilt. False guilt comes when we have confessed our sin, but we haven’t forgiven ourselves, and we don’t forget what we have done. False guilt causes us to punish ourselves again and again. We become so fixated on past mistakes that we forfeit future opportunities. We mistakenly think that our sins disqualify us from God using us and what happens is this, our feelings of guilt become the cage that keeps up from chasing the Wild Goose.
II. Jesus Loves Us Out of Our Cage- (Luke 22:54-62; Romans 5:8)
a. Peter in the cage of guilt- Let’s go back to Peter, and see how Peter
ends up in this cage of guilt. Listen to Luke 22:54-62, “Then seizing him, they led Jesus away and took Him into the house of the high priest. Peter followed at a distance but when they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and had sat down together, Peter sat down with them. A servant girl saw him seated there in the firelight. She looked closely at him and said, ‘This man was with him.’ But he denied it. ‘Woman, I don’t know him,’ he said.”
Now let’s stop for a moment to make an observation: Peter really gets a bum rap here, because even though he denies knowing Jesus, he is there by Jesus. Where are all the other disciples? None of them got close enough to get caught. Continuing… “ A little later someone else saw him and said, ‘You also are one of them.’ ‘Man, I am not!’ Peter replied. About an hour later another asserted, ‘Certainly this fellow was with him, for he is a Galilean.’ Peter replied, ‘Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Just as he was speaking, the rooster crowed. The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him: ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will disown me three times.’ And Peter went outside and wept bitterly.”
I’ll tell you what, looking at Scripture through the lens of Ivan Pavlov is an interesting exercise and Peter makes an interesting case study. I have read this story countless times, but it wasn’t until I was reading over this series, and the words of Mark Batterson, that he helped me to think about this: How do you think Peter reacted the rest of his life each time he heard a rooster crow? I would imagine that every time a rooster crowed, it took him back to these feelings of guilt and reminded him of how he denied Jesus three times in Jesus’ greatest moment of need. Every time a rooster crowed, it put Peter right back in the cage of guilt.
This story, and this cage, should remind us of a tactic that hasn’t changed since the Garden of Eden. I’ll tell you exactly what the enemy wants to do, he wants to remind you of what you’ve done wrong/ over and over and over again, and then he wants to remind you again and again and again, because he wants you to live in the cage of guilt, wants to, in a sense, condition your spiritual reflexes with guilt. He wants to hurl accusations at you. And Jesus came to recondition our spiritual reflexes with His grace so that we are no longer reactionaries, but rather revolutionaries for His cause. Not living in the cage of guilt but living this spiritual adventure that He called us to.
b. Leading us out of the cage- Let me point out to you one little
sentence in this passage that is easy to overlook, but it is there for a reason: the sentence is, ‘At that moment, the Lord turned and looked straight at Peter.’ Have you ever noticed that sentence? It’s almost there as a footnote in the text but I think it speaks volumes. The split second after Peter denies knowing Jesus, Jesus looks straight at him and makes eye contact. I don’t think it was a look of condemnation, because we just read how Jesus told Peter he would deny Jesus three times. Jesus not only knew that Peter would deny Him three times, but He also KNEW that Peter would beat himself up over this. Jesus knew that this could cause Peter to give up on Himself, but Jesus would never give up on Peter.
Eye contact is a powerful thing. Turn and look for a moment at the person next to you. Look them in the eye, Okay, look back up here. When you look someone in the eye there will be different feelings. Right now it probably was very uncomfortable because this isn’t what you would normally do. If you look at your spouse in the eye, it often is an intimate and close feeling. When you look someone in the eye, there is a connection. If you look at your children in the eyes when they have done something wrong, it is convicting for them. When Jesus looks Peter in the eyes, I think it is a look of love. Jesus is trying to show Peter LOVE in what would become one of Peter’s lowest times in his life. In essence, Jesus was saying with this look: “Peter, look at me. Look at me. I forgave you before you even denied me. I just want you to know I haven’t given up on you. We are still in this thing together.”
I’m not sure what mistakes you’ve made. I don’t know what sinful memories are etched into your brain. I have no ideas what failures form that cage of guilt in your life, but I do know this — God hasn’t given up on you. It is not in God’s nature to give up on you, and God doesn’t want you to give up on yourself. I think at a very fundamental level, if you can grasp this spiritual truth, you are going to be ok. Those times in our lives when we fail so badly that we feel absolutely unworthy to receive the grace of God is the time when we need most to look in the eyes of Jesus, and like Peter, see that look of love gazing back at us!
Jesus loves us with an incredible grace. As Romans 5:8 tells us: “For God showed His love for us in this, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” God doesn’t wait until we get our act together before He starts showing us love. When we are at our worst, God is at His best.
Conclusion: I’ve preached a couple of times on how this story has ended, So let me recap for you. After Jesus has been resurrected, Peter has gone fishing. Jesus appears to Peter, and has a lunch with Peter. Three times during the lunch Jesus asks Peter: “Do you love me?” Three times Peter tells Jesus that he does. I truly believe that this was Jesus’ way of restoring Peter to ministry, and of letting Peter say “I’m sorry Jesus for denying You.” I believe it is Jesus telling Peter that He believes in Him, and for Him to go back to “fishing for men.”
Imagine the adventure that Peter would have missed out on if he had given up on himself, or thought that God had given up on him. The places he went, the people he met, the things he did, the miracles that God did through him, what a life of spiritual adventure. There was a moment he could have gone back in the cage of guilt and lived there forever, but he didn’t do that, and I think it is because of what Jesus does.
Jesus knew something about conditioned reflexes before Ivan Pavlov came along. Peter failed three times, Jesus reconditioned him three times. But that’s not all that took place: in John 21:4, we are told that this all happened right after daybreak; or right after the rooster crowed. Jesus’ timing was purposeful. Jesus wanted to break Peter of his conditioned response, because He knew Peter wouldn’t be free of his cage of guilt until he was. After this, I would imagine that the rooster’s crow no longer brought him feelings of guilt, but rather it was a reminder of God’s grace. Maybe now the rooster’s crow produced feelings of gratitude toward God.
As we share in communion together this morning, let this meal be a reminder of God’s grace, and let this grace break you out of your cage of guilt. Sin minus grace produces guilt. The cage of guilt can capture us at any time, But with this communion meal, Jesus asks us: “Do you love me.” And by partaking of the meal together, we are telling Jesus, ‘Yes, I love you.” And Jesus tells us, be free of your guilt, and live the spiritual adventure. Amen.
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