Where would we go?
John 6:68-69
“Simon Peter answered, ‘Lord, who will we go to? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
The quote above may be one of the most beautiful quotes about following Christ. And would you believe that it came from the same man who denied that he even knew Christ when he was arrested? But I think Peter gets a bad reputation for being the one to do foolish things, like before Jesus was going into Jerusalem and he was telling his disciples what all would take place, that he would be arrested and killed, and Peter said that would never happen, and Jesus had to rebuke him and called him Satan! But I think that Peter may be the most honest disciple that we see. He doesn’t hold back on us in Scripture. He never stops being human and showing and telling people what he thinks, even if it is completely wrong. I think that is why I love him so much because I can easily have selfish ambition about what I believe God should be doing.
But the verses above come on the heels of Jesus giving some pretty hard teachings, and a number of the disciple’s decide that Jesus is too hard to follow and they want to go and follow someone else. So Jesus ask the 12 if they are going to leave too, and Peter responds for the whole group in saying “There is nowhere else for us to go. You are the one who holds the words of life.” What a brutally honest answer that Peter gives, and he is right. Where were they really going to go?
What about us today? It seems that in the church today people don’t even have to hear the hard teachings of Christ to turn and run towards something else. People can simply come and hear about the grace of God that was poured out for us in Jesus, our sinfulness and our need for a savior, and people decide they would rather go somewhere else and do something else instead of being reminded about the beauty of the Gospel. They may not be going out to hear someone else preach something other than the Gospel but they leave to go participate in sporting events for their kids (who would be much better off in the long run hearing the Gospel of Jesus on a weekly basis than kicking a ball around). Or they decide that they are going to go and enjoy their weekends at the beach because the kids are only going to be young once, or they hate to pay for something year around and then never use it in the summer. There are thousands of different reason why people would turn and walk away from God, but do they honestly know what they are walking away from?