“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . you are with me.”
These words from Psalm 23 were some of the first I committed to memory as a new Christian. But they took on a transformative power after my mom died unexpectedly and tragically when she was 52.
God used the pain of death to push words I’d known in my head down 18 inches into the wild country of my heart. I’d known Psalm 23 like an island on a map that I’d never visited. Her death was like being shipwrecked and vomited out of the storm onto that island. Death, for me, was familiar as charted but bigger and more intimidating in person.
I’m not the first to encounter a gap between a theological truth I know in my head and the kind of knowledge that takes on flesh through personal experience. We see this gap highlighted at the moment of Peter’s restoration when he said, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you” (John 21:17). But though he knew Jesus’s love intellectually, Peter would come to know it more deeply, in ways that cut him, commissioned him, and ultimately kept him until death.
Surgeon’s Searching Questions
At an intellectual level, Peter’s theology in that moment was correct. Jesus, being God, knew everything. Peter also knew Jesus was full of grace (1:14). But there’s a difference between having head knowledge about Jesus’s grace and personally experiencing it. So Jesus three times asks whether or not Peter loves him (21:15–17)—the same number of times Peter had denied him (Luke 22:61). The Savior’s goal was to press the truth of his knowledge and love into the depths of Peter’s being and transform him.
Master physician as he is, Jesus insists on cutting through layers of lesser symptoms to address the deepest cancers of our souls. Peter would’ve seen Jesus heal and forgive sinners dozens of times. He had an intellectual grasp of Jesus’s power, but he also knew his own brokenness.
Master physician as he is, Jesus insists on cutting through layers of lesser symptoms to address the deepest cancers of our souls.
Peter’s thrice denial wasn’t just shameful; it was embarrassing, especially when you consider that one of his questioners was a young servant girl (v. 56). Shame and self-doubt were sure to plague Peter after his denial, but these cancers wouldn’t go unaddressed by the Savior. Each reiteration of Jesus’s question cut Peter deeper.
Cuts to Heal
The questions hurt him (John 21:17), but cuts from Jesus’s deep and precise scalpel were necessary to remove Peter’s doubt, guilt, and embarrassment. Peter doesn’t hesitate to answer Jesus’s threefold questions about his love. He knows that Jesus knows he loves him. But by asking searching questions that exposed Peter’s shame and guilt, Jesus moved the apostle from mere head knowledge of his love and grace to personal knowledge.
Jesus drives Peter to the end of his self-assurance and into a deeper assurance of Jesus’s grip on him. And a depth of grace Peter previously hadn’t known would transform his ability to lead others and help them drink from Christ’s depths as well.
Wounded Healer’s Commissioning
Until we’ve feasted deeply on Jesus’s grace, it’s impossible for us to feed others (2 Cor. 1:4). This was Jesus’s purpose in his relentless questions about Peter’s love. He peeled back Peter’s wounds layer by layer and then applied his healing medicine so he might release Peter to feed and take care of others. Hurt and grieved but cured, Peter was then well positioned to take that cure to others.
Jesus doesn’t promise not to hurt us, but he hurts with the desire to make us healers. Restored, Peter wasn’t the same. His knowledge of Jesus’s grace had moved from propositional truth to personal experience. Yes, the Lord “[knows] everything” (John 21:17), but that knowledge includes tailor-made prescriptions to heal sin-sick souls like Peter, you, and me.
“It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply,” A. W. Tozer once quipped. Jesus grieved Peter not for the pain’s sake—he’s no sadist—but for transformation’s sake. Peter had seen him go to the cross, die, and rise in triumph. Jesus was wounded so Peter could be healed. Now he wounds Peter so he can heal others.
Love That Keeps
Like Jacob before him (Gen. 32:25), Peter would always walk with a tender limp. After all, the apostle’s failure of nerve was documented and passed down through history. But grace is funny like that. It doesn’t deny or gloss over our failures; it shines brightest against them (Rom. 5:20).
Jesus doesn’t promise not to hurt us, but he hurts with the desire to make us healers.
If the early church was built and led by men like Peter, this should give us all hope today. Peter’s denial wasn’t the final word on his life. Neither was his love of Jesus. Instead, it was the love of the One who restored him that kept him and keeps the church to the end.
Because of his own fickle will, Peter denied Jesus, but a day would come when he’d die the death of a martyr (John 21:18–19) and then hear those longed-for words, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matt. 25:23). Yet even in death, it wouldn’t be Peter’s failures, or his faithfulness, that kept him. No, what kept Peter was the truth of Jesus’s grace that over the course of the apostle’s life transformed from a mere intellectual statement to his lived reality.
The Gospel Coalition