MORNING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/17/2026
10:05 AM
My
Worship Time Focus: “The Right Life Experiences”
John MacArthur writes: Peter’s natural abilities needed to be shaped
and molded by the experiences of his life before he could be the leader God
meant him to be. Experience can be a
hard teacher, and the lessons Peter learned were dramatic and often
painful. He sometimes soared to the
dizzying heights of theological insight, and other times plunged into the abyss
of woeful ignorance—sometimes in the same incident (Matt. 16:16, 23). The gospels record five experiences that helped mold Peter into
the man God could use.
“The first experience was Peter’s
great revelation, described in John 6:66-69.
After feeding a large crowd of five thousand men and thousands more
women and children. Jesus presented
Himself to them as the Bread of Life. When He challenged His hearers to commit
themselves totally to Him, using the graphic metaphor of eating His flesh and
drinking His blood (v.53), ‘many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking
with Him anymore’ (v.66). Turning to the
Twelve Jesus asked, ‘You do not want to go away also, do you?’ (v. 67). Based
on the private miracle they had just seen during the night—Jesus walking
on the lake—which ramped up their faith in Him beyond what even the miracle
feeding did (Mark 6:52), Peter acted as the spokesman for the rest as he
usually did (John 13:36-37; Matt. 15:15; 16:16; 17:4: 18:21; 19:27; 26:33, 35;
Mark 11:21; Luke 5:8; 8:45; 12:41) with the answer: ‘Lord, to whom shall we go?
You have words of eternal life. We have
believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God’ (John
6:68-69). While it is true to Peter’s
conviction, along with the Twelve, that statement was nonetheless a revelation
from God, like Peter’s later more explicit confession that Jesus was the
Messiah and Son of God (Matt. 16:16-17).
This experience taught Peter that
God would give him the message he was to proclaim through divine means (cf.
John 14:26; 16:13-14). Though he was
merely a fisherman, not educated in the rabbinic schools (Acts 4:13), he did
not need to be concerned about what he would say, for God would reveal it to
him. The confidence allowed Peter to
boldly and fearlessly proclaim the gospel, as recorded in the early chapters of
Acts.
Another life-shaping experience for
Peter was the great promise given to him.
In response to his confession of Jesus as the Messiah (Matt. 16:16), the
Lord
Said to
him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal
this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.
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. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of
heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.’ (vv.
17-19)
The
foundation on which the church is built is the truth that the Lord Jesus Christ
is the Messiah, the Son of God. It was
Peter’s privilege not only to articulate that reality, but also to preach it
until his death. By so doing, he would
shut the gates of hell so that its forces would not prevail against the church,
and open the gates of heaven for all who believed, including both Jews (Acts
2:14-40) and Gentiles (Acts 10:1-48).
6/17/2026 10:56 AM
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