Video Transcript: Peter, Apostle of Jesus Christ

We're starting a series on 1 Peter, and the overall theme of 1 Peter is suffering and glory. It speaks of the prophets predicting Jesus' sufferings and the glories that would follow. It speaks over and over again of the fact that Jesus died on the tree, that we might die to sins and live to righteousness and be healed by His wounds.

At the end of Peter, or very near the end, there's a verse that used to be quoted at all the profession of faith services when I grew up. And in those services, they would always say to the person who had just professed their faith, and the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm, and steadfast. To Him be the power forever and ever, Amen.

So there was always this word that you're going to suffer, and there's going to be glory because that's how the God of all grace operates. And that's a theme that runs all through 1 Peter, and so I've titled the overall series on 1 Peter, Suffering and Glory. 1 Peter and 2 Peter are among the Catholic epistles, or the general epistles.

They're not addressed to just one particular church, but more generally, and they're also not written by the Apostle Paul, because there's an awful lot of letters in the New Testament written by Paul, but the general epistles have a more general audience often, and they're written by a variety of writers. James, the brother of our Lord, Peter, who wrote these two letters, as well as contributed greatly to the Gospel according to Mark, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, written by the beloved disciple John, and then the book of Jude. Those are the general epistles, and Peter's letters are considered among them.

And today we're going to focus on the very first phrase of Peter, Peter, an Apostle of Jesus Christ. He begins by saying, Peter, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, two God's elect strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ, and sprinkling by His blood, grace and peace be yours in abundance. I was planning to move kind of lickety-split through the first chapter of Peter, and wound up saying, well, I'm going to have to do one sermon on the first phrase, and then another sermon on who Peter is writing to, and another sermon on what Peter says about God.

Because when Peter says hello, he says more than a lot of theologians say in their fat volumes. He says as much in these verses right here, as many people can say when they're talking all day. What he says about himself, what he says about the people whom he's writing to, and the God whom he's writing on behalf of.

So we're going to focus especially on who Peter is, but in these first few verses, it's kind of a who's who. Peter is an apostle of Jesus Christ. You who read or hear his letter are elect, you're chosen.

You're also exiles, strangers in the world, and scattered. You're chosen by God according to His foreknowledge. You're set apart by the Holy Spirit.

You're people who are meant to be obedient to Jesus, and cleansed by Jesus' blood. That's who you are. And who is God? God is Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

It's all there in two verses of saying hello. And then in Peter's second sentence, he goes on for ten verses, which in Greek is one sentence. So as I said, when he says hi guys, already he has revealed a great deal about himself, about you, and about God.

And then he launches into that great sentence which begins, praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ that some of you have memorized. So let's focus today on who is Peter, and he's an apostle of Jesus Christ. And as we think about that, I want to highlight twelve things about Peter, because it is so very important that we not just dive straight into the letter, but that we have a sense of who is writing and speaking to us on behalf of Jesus Christ.

We're going to see Peter as a brother, a fisherman, a husband, a human, a sinner, a friend, a believer, the rock, the eyewitness, the preacher, healer, pioneer, hero, martyr. You can't just listen to Peter and say, oh there was some guy named Peter that lived way back when, and we're reading something he wrote. You've got to hear who is really speaking and writing here.

Peter was a brother, in fact that's how he met Jesus in the first place. Peter's original name was Simon, and Simon was a brother of Andrew, and Andrew was a guy who followed John the Baptist and took to heart John's message of repentance. And then one day, John pointed at somebody else and said, look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

And so Andrew thought, well, why would I follow John any longer? And off he went and followed Jesus instead. And then Andrew went and told his brother Simon, we have found the Messiah, that is the Christ, the Anointed One. And Andrew brought Peter to Jesus.

He came to know Jesus first through his brother. And Peter goes on to become much more famous and in some ways important than Andrew. But never forget that oftentimes it's the less famous person who had a huge role in bringing somebody else.

Some of the great men that you've heard of in history were introduced to Jesus by their mother. There have been great preachers who were liberals who were converted by people in their own congregation. Abraham Kuyper was converted by two women in his congregation who told him about the real way of being born again and saved through Jesus Christ after he had all the knowledge supposedly and was preaching to them.

And they knew something big was missing from his preaching. So it may be a brother, it may be a mom, it may be a buddy. Many times the great people of history were brought to Christ by somebody you almost didn't even hear of.

So whether you're great, unimportant in your own eyes, or somewhere in between, the Lord can use you. But Peter was part of a family. He was a brother.

And he was not only a brother, but he was in partnership with his brother Andrew and with a couple of their buddies, James and John. And those guys had their own little fishing business going on near the Sea of Galilee. And so these guys are fishermen.

When you think of Peter, of Simon, you're not first of all talking about a nice office worker with soft hands and clean fingernails. You're dealing with a guy who smells like fish and has maybe some fish blood and fish guts on his clothes. That's how Peter is operating in partnership with his brother Andrew and with James and John, their friends.

And Peter has been introduced to Jesus, but then one day Jesus comes along and he sees Simon and Andrew casting a net into the lake for their fishermen. And Jesus said, come follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And Peter and Andrew left everything, they left their nets and followed Jesus.

Jesus continued a little further down and saw James and John, the fishing partners, and called them to become fishers of men as well. And that's how they got started in this business of serving Jesus and of walking with him. They came as fishermen.

Peter was a married man. One of Jesus' first miracles was to help out Peter's mother-in-law. Jesus went to the home of Simon and Andrew.

Evidently Simon and Andrew and their spouses lived together. That was more common back then, where you might have more than one family sharing a common dwelling, especially if you weren't all that rich, and you might even have the store or the business as part of the building. But at any rate, Jesus goes to their house and finds out that Simon's mother-in-law is down with illness, and Jesus helps her up.

And the fever leaves. Later on, Peter goes on various missions and travels on behalf of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we read that his wife was traveling with him on those missions. So he's a man who comes from a family, has a brother, has a wife, and he's a very human person.

For many of us, I think, when we read the Bible, that's one of the things that's almost appealing about Peter, because you kind of have to chuckle sometimes when Peter is in action. Peter is a man who responds very quickly and boldly to Jesus. When he sees Jesus walking on the water, like all the other disciples, at first he's afraid.

But then, after he believes it's Jesus, he says, well, why can't I do that? So he asks Jesus to invite him out of the boat, and Jesus does. And Peter walks on that water until he sees the storm. And then fear overtakes him again, and he starts going down until Jesus rescues him.

Sometimes he says dumb stuff. Jesus tells him that Jesus is going to be suffering, and eventually be killed. And Peter says, never, Lord! This will never happen to You! He doesn't get it.

He doesn't understand Jesus' mission, and he's even willing to correct Jesus and straighten Him out. When he's with Jesus on the mountain of transfiguration, and Jesus is shining with His overwhelming glory, and Moses and Elijah have come down from heaven for a conversation with Jesus in that brilliant glory, Peter's contribution is, I could put up three shelters for you guys. Well, that was brilliant, wasn't it? You know, you're here with visitors from heavenly glory, and Peter's little lean-to is going to contribute to the situation.

When Jesus is going around washing His disciples' feet on the night before Jesus died, Peter says, never, Lord! You shall never wash my feet! And Jesus says, well, unless I wash your feet, you don't have any part in Me. And then Peter says, well, not my feet, but everything washed me all over the place. He's blurting these things, and a lot of the things he's blurting, I think a lot of us can relate to and say, yeah, you know, he's maybe not a great genius at times, but neither am I. He's acting and reacting kind of the way I might have if I had been there.

Later on, when Peter is a more seasoned apostle, and after the resurrection of Jesus, and he's been filled with the Holy Spirit, he still doesn't have too high an opinion of himself. When he goes to the household of Cornelius to bring the Gospel to that Roman officer's family, Cornelius falls on the ground in front of him. And Peter says, oh, come on, get up.

I'm only a man myself. When you read on in 1 Peter, Peter, by now, he's had all kinds of revelations of Jesus Christ, and has heard Him personally, and has done mighty things, and when he's going to tell the elders what to do, he says, I appeal to you as a fellow elder. Those of you who are elders here, in some ways that's a very important office in the church, but at the same time, do you really think of yourself in the same breath as the apostle Peter? But he appeals to elders as a fellow elder, because Peter, for everything that's true of him, is just a man.

He's human. In fact, he's a sinner. Peter is fishing, and Jesus offers a little advice, and says, why don't you try the other side of the boat? And Peter, okay, thanks, carpenter, for your excellent fishing advice.

We've been fishing all night, and haven't caught a thing, but a little helpful advice from a carpenter to chuck the net on the other side of the boat, that's going to work great. But okay, if you say so, I'll do it. So he puts it in on the other side of the boat, and he's got so many fish in the net that the net is starting to tear, and at that point, Peter is no longer thinking about what a catch.

He just falls on the ground, and he says, go away from me, Lord. I'm a sinful man. When Jesus is being arrested on that Thursday night, Peter's initial response is to whip out his sword, and then hack off, he's trying to knock his head off, probably, but he knocks off the ear of the high priest's servant.

Then later that night, Peter denies three times that he ever knew Jesus Christ. And even after that, after he's witnessed the risen Jesus, after he's been filled with the Holy Spirit, even then, Peter has his faults, sometimes great faults. There was a time in Antioch where Peter had been ministering to people and enjoying eating with Gentile believers, non-Jewish believers, and then some people came from Jerusalem who frowned on eating with non-Jewish people.

And Peter was very afraid of what they might think of him, so he withdrew, and he wouldn't eat with non-Jewish people anymore. And the apostle Paul said, that's out of line with the gospel. That's behaving like a hypocrite.

And he got up and he told Peter off right in front of everybody else, and Peter got back on the right track again. But it was a time when he was just hypocritically avoiding non-Jewish Christians. So when we think of Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, he is not just a man, but a sinful man who needed, like everybody else, to be saved by the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Peter was a friend of Jesus. And Jesus had different levels of friendship during his time here on earth. He had disciples, he had women who were close to his ministry and supporting his ministry whom he was friends with, and he had the twelve who were specially selected to be witnesses.

And then among those twelve, he had three, three that were especially close to him, Peter and James and John. It's very likely that James and John were Jesus' cousins. We know that John the Baptist was a relative of Jesus, but James and John's mother, Salome, if you reconstruct different parts of the Bible that talk about them, the mother of James and John is likely Salome, the wife of Zebedee, and Salome is a sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

So Jesus is very close to John, to James, and then to Peter. And when Jesus went in to a girl who had died, the daughter of Jairus, he took only the girl's parents and Peter, James, and John. When Jesus went up on that mountain to pray and then to be transfigured and made glorious and splendid, he took along Peter, James, and John.

The night Jesus was betrayed, he went into the Garden of Gethsemane to pray and his disciples were with him, but then he had said, okay, you guys stay here. And then he took Peter, James, and John further with him, and they were closer to him when he was praying in agony in that garden. They were the inner circle of the inner circle.

There was nobody closer to Jesus Christ than Peter, James, and John. And Peter was a believer. That is one of the crucial, key things about him.

Jesus asked his disciples, well, how's it going? What are people saying? Who do they say that I am? And there was a whole variety of different ideas that people had about Jesus that were floating around. And then Jesus said, now you, who do you say I am? And Peter said, you are the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Those are the words of a believer.

There's a lot of opinions about Jesus being a great guy or a wonderful teacher or this or that. Peter got to the core of it. You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

He believed that. He recognized who Jesus is. On another occasion, a lot of the crowds that had been following Jesus started thinning out and people who had been His disciples weren't following Him anymore.

And Jesus turned to His own closest followers and He said, how about you? Do you want out as well? And Peter says, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God. When so many others are falling away, you have the words of eternal life.

We believe, we know that you are the Holy One of God. Today there are many people who were church goers or grew up in churches. And when you see them falling away, you're going to say, well, is there really any truth to this Jesus thing? But not if you're like Peter.

Not if you're like Peter. You say, who? There's all these fads. There's these people doing this and that.

But who else has the words of eternal life? Who else is the Holy One of God? No matter what anybody else does, I believe and I know that. And so I can't leave Jesus. So you see, He's a brother, a fisherman, a husband, a human, a sinner, a friend, a believer.

And He's also these mighty things that characterize a true apostle of Jesus Christ. He is the rock, the eyewitness, the preacher, the healer, the pioneer, the hero, the martyr. After Jesus asked Peter that question and Peter answered, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus said to Simon, I tell you, you are Peter or Cephas.

Cephas is Aramaic for rock. Peter is Greek for rock. And He says, your name was Simon, but you are the rock.

And on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

He gave Peter this name, rock. And just keep in mind, Peter at that point is still not fully rock-like. A mighty, solid, unchanging person.

But we sometimes get things backward. We think Jesus passes out a label as though He's just kind of patching a little label on what we already are. Jesus didn't call Peter rock because Peter was a rock.

Peter became a rock because Jesus called him rock. When Jesus speaks a word and declares you to be somebody, that is who you become, even if you weren't that before He said it. Keep that in mind, because we're going to be reading again and again in 1 Peter, statements of Peter, actually statements of Jesus through Peter about who we are.

And you say, boy, I don't know, I sure don't feel much like that. Well, keep in mind that God doesn't say stuff to tell you that you're already this, so much as He's telling you that and declaring it to be so, and you become that because of His word to you. Jesus said, you are the rock.

And sometimes this passage has been taken to say, and Peter had successors who were themselves the rock, the successors of Peter, the popes who are meant to rule over the church. That's not an accurate understanding. You can read this passage a thousand times and you will never read the words, I am appointing successors to the end of time, who will be ordained as the successor of Peter and as the vicar of Christ on earth.

Even Peter himself, as I've already mentioned, had to be corrected at times by his fellow apostles, so he did not have an absolute authority over all the church. That's an error to think that way. But it's also an error to think, yeah, you know, Pete, he was just another guy.

Not quite. Jesus said, you are rock and I'm building on you. So let's not try to transfer what was said of Peter to all kinds of other people after Peter.

If you want to be one of the true successors of Peter, it's not going to be what church hierarchy you're part of or what great title you hold. You are a successor, Peter, if you listen to the words of Jesus Christ through Peter in his letters, in the gospel according to Mark. When you hear Peter speak and you believe and you trust like Peter and you seek to live in the power of Jesus Christ like Peter, then you are in the apostolic succession.

That's a word that's sometimes used by various churches. And they say, well, so-and-so laid his hands on so-and-so who did that down through the generations, and that's called apostolic succession. No, apostolic succession is listening to the word of the apostles, taking it to heart and building on the foundation of the original apostles.

We know what they said. We have 1 and 2 Peter and Mark from Peter. We have the gospel according to John and the letters of John.

We have those things, so we can be their successors and build on them because we have it straight from their own testimony and their own mouths. Those apostles, and Peter in particular here, were eyewitnesses. And Peter makes no secret of that.

Peter, I got that slide wrong, it's 1 Peter 5, verse 1. Peter says, I appeal as a witness of Christ's sufferings. I'm a witness. And in 2 Peter 1, verse 16, he says, We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty.

He says, we were with Him on the holy mountain. We ourselves heard that very voice speaking from heaven because we were with Him. So, Peter writes as somebody who was there when all these things happened in the life and healing and teaching and ministry of Jesus Christ.

Peter saw Jesus walk on water and even walked on water himself. He heard Jesus' voice for three years of teaching. He heard the Father's voice from heaven saying, This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.

He saw Moses and Elijah. He saw Jesus' glory. Peter raced with John when they heard from women that the tomb was empty.

And he raced with John and John won the race. But John stopped outside the tomb and Peter went running right on in, right next to where Jesus' body had been laid and found those clothes lying there. That's what I mean by an eyewitness.

He was in the tomb. He was in the upper room with the doors locked and Jesus just came right into the room, arisen and in power and ate with Peter and the other disciples. He was there when Jesus breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit.

As the Father is sending me, I am sending you. He was there when Jesus said, Go into all the world and preach the gospel. Peter heard with his own ears the marching orders from the risen Lord Jesus Christ.

Some of you say, Boy, I wish I had been there when Jesus was telling His disciples about all the Old Testament prophecies that pointed to Him and all this other stuff. Don't you realize that what Peter wrote down and what John wrote down was what Jesus told them? Peter wasn't this great theological genius. You read in 1 and 2 Peter and you will find again and again and again all these things drawn from Old Testament references Where do you think he got that? After Jesus had risen from the death, he spent another 40 days talking with his disciples about how all those prophecies had been fulfilled.

When you're listening to Peter and John and the other writings of the apostles in the New Testament, you're hearing what Jesus told them. And you're hearing it applied in different situations. Peter said when he was speaking in the book of Acts, we are witnesses of everything Jesus did.

He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen by us who ate and drank with Him after He rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach. So that is one of the key things about a true apostle.

They were eyewitnesses of Jesus' entire ministry from its beginning. And especially eyewitnesses who saw and touched and ate with the risen Lord Jesus Christ. And because Jesus commissioned them, of course, Peter is a preacher.

Read in the book of Acts and you get some of his sermons. When we get into this letter, you get some more of the mighty statements of Peter. But here on Pentecost, Jesus says, God has made this Jesus whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.

Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and you'll receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. He gives that sermon, and 3,000 people are brought to the Lord in one day. When he's standing before some of Jesus' fiercest enemies, he says, there is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved.

He makes these great declarations. Peter was a mighty, mighty preacher in the power of the Holy Spirit. And not only that, like his master Jesus, Peter had great powers of healing.

The book of Acts gives a variety of examples of that. And then it gives kind of a general description here. People brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter's shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by.

Crowds gathered bringing their sick and those tormented by evil spirits. All of them were healed. His shadow hits some people, and they're healed.

So don't just say, yeah, Pete, he was just another guy. You know, yeah, he was human alright, but when somebody's walking along and their shadow is bringing healing, there's something very amazing going on straight from the power of God. When you take some of the particular stories from the book of Acts, Peter goes into the temple with John, and he meets a man there who has been crippled from birth.

Whether it was a problem in the delivery process of the baby or whatever happened, this person could never walk his entire life. And so he's a beggar asking people for money. And Peter and John are walking by, and Peter says to the man, look at me, look at me.

I don't have any money. I got something else. What I have, I give you.

In the name of Jesus Christ, stand up and walk. And the man is standing up and leaping and jumping around and praising God. Later on, Peter goes to the town of Joppa, and there's a man named Aeneas who for the last eight years has been paralyzed, paralyzed for eight years.

And Peter says, get up, walk. He gets up and walks. There's a woman named Tabitha, or in Greek, Dorcas, or in our language, Gazelle.

And she is loved by everybody who knows her because she just specializes in doing nice things for people and helping out widows and people who are going through all kinds of hard times and making clothes for them and bringing them encouragement. And then she dies. But Peter is in town.

And Peter says, Tabitha, get up. And she gets up. So when you hear the words, Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, you're hearing a letter from a man whose shadow healed people, who raised somebody to their feet who had been crippled since birth.

Another paralyzed for eight years and another who was dead. That's, well, I think it's impressive. How about you? I haven't done that lately, okay? This is Peter, the healer.

And you, and just, I should add what Peter said. When he raised that man to his feet who had been crippled for eight years, then he says, now why are you people staring at me as though I did something? It's the power of Jesus Christ that did this. Don't forget, he's an apostle of Jesus Christ, and it's just the mighty power in the name of Jesus Christ that's accomplishing all this.

Peter's also a great pioneer. The gospel is going into Samaria and Philip, one of Jesus' disciples, is carrying it there. But the people of Samaria haven't yet received the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

So Peter and John go to Samaria, and they pray and lay their hands on the Samaritans, and the Samaritans receive the Holy Spirit. And as you may know from your Bible readings, the Samaritans and Jews were not big buds, to put it mildly. But Jesus had fellowshiped with and helped and healed Samaritans, and so Peter, as a faithful follower of Jesus, did too.

And then Peter receives a vision where he's supposed to go to a Roman officer, somebody who's part of the occupying enemy power and non-Jewish. And Peter doesn't really want to do it very badly, but he knows that he's being sent there by God. So he goes and he says to Cornelius, I now know that God does not show favoritism.

And Peter is a pioneer of carrying the gospel across cultural barriers and boundaries. When the Jerusalem council meets, they're letting Gentiles, non-Jewish people in, but now how tough should we make it on them? Do they have to do everything that traditionally Jewish people were required to do or not? That's the question of the council. And Peter argues, and others with him argue, that they should make it easy and not put up needless obstacles for non-Jewish people to follow Jesus as well.

So he is a pioneer of carrying the gospel to people of many different cultural backgrounds. He wasn't making 40,000 a speech when he did that. He wasn't writing long treatises on how bad your cultural group is or how racist yours is.

He just said, God doesn't show favoritism. Whoever you are, come to Jesus Christ. And they found reconciliation through that pioneering ministry of Peter and his fellow apostles.

Peter was a hero. And among other things, heroes are brave. He had his moments where he chickened out, but once he was filled with the Holy Spirit, he was a mighty hero.

The Bible says that when he was telling these people, the very people who had killed Jesus, that they needed to repent, it says, when they saw the courage, the bravery, the boldness of Peter and John, and realized they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished, and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. Peter said to his opponents, we must obey God rather than man. Peter sometimes got in great difficulty for that, but he knew that he was with God.

He knew that you need to suffer if you want to enter into the glory. He knew the path that Jesus had walked, and he walked it too. He was a mighty hero and ultimately a martyr.

Peter was out fishing and Jesus was on the shore and helped them catch another big load of fish, and then had breakfast with his disciples. And then he three times asked Peter, now do you love me? Because he was helping Peter to get back on track after that threefold denial. And then three times Jesus said, feed my sheep or feed my lambs.

And after he had restored Peter to his position as an apostle, he said, when you're old, they're going to stretch out your arms and they're going to take you where you don't want to go. Peter knew what that prophecy meant. He was going to be dying in much the same manner as his Master had.

And so all his life, he knew that's how it was going to end. He knew that he was going to be crucified. And between the time Jesus said that and the time that it actually happened, Peter was threatened.

He was beaten. He was jailed twice. He was rescued from prison by an angel.

Just again, this is an ordinary resume, okay? This is a guy who on the night before he was supposed to have his head chopped off, slept like a baby. Okay, you try that. Oh, they're going to lop my head off in the morning.

Ah, what blissful slumber. The angel has to kick him a few times to wake him up. That's how the book of Acts tells the story.

Okay, whack that guy. He won't wake up. I got to get him out of here and he won't wake up.

So the angel comes and wakes him up. And the angel looks at the doors and they pop open and the chains fall off and all of that. And Peter heads on out.

But even with those miraculous rescues, he knows that it's not because he's going to get the easy path. He knows that if the Lord rescues him, well, then he's got more to do. But he knows how it's going to end.

And by the time he writes 2 Peter, he says, I'm soon to die. I know that the putting off of my body will be soon as our Lord Jesus made clear to me. He knew what Jesus had told him.

He never forgot it. And he knew he was going to have his arms stretched out, but he also said, I am not worthy to die in the same way as my Master. And so he was crucified upside down and murdered under the evil Roman Emperor Nero.

That's how Peter's life on earth ended. He sealed his testimony with his blood and his suffering. So, who are you going to listen to? I guess that's an important question.

There are a lot of voices out there these days. There are a lot of those who claim to be great heroes or champions for this or that cause. Who are you going to pay attention to? Who are you going to listen to? Do you want to listen to one of Jesus' three closest friends? The man who when others were fleeing away said, I'm not going anywhere.

You have the words of eternal life. Do you want to listen to the rock? The one who was the eyewitness. The one who stood in Jesus' tomb and saw the clothes there.

He knows what he's talking about. The one who was with Jesus after Jesus had risen from the dead. The one whose shadow brought healing to people.

The one who crossed cultural barriers. The hero who said, I'm going to obey God, not men. The martyr crucified upside down rather than change his story or deny that Jesus Christ was risen from the dead.

You can hear lots of different stories. You can hear lots of different writers these days. There's books all over the place.

There's media programs. There are claims to your loyalty. There are people who think they have a good argument for this or that.

Who do you want to listen to? That's the whole point. I'm not asking you to memorize these 12 points. You're never going to remember all 12 points of a 12-point sermon.

The question is this. Who are you going to listen to? The Apostle of Jesus Christ. The rock, the foremost Apostle of Jesus Christ.

Not just an Apostle. He really is the foremost Apostle. The spokesman for all the Apostles of Jesus Christ.

And when He speaks, it is the voice of Christ. We did not follow cleverly invented myths. We were eyewitnesses of the majesty.

When you listen to 1 and 2 Peter, that's who you're listening to. And somebody greater. Lord, we thank You for the mighty heroes of faith that You called from obscurity to become mighty in You.

And we thank You that their words have been written and recorded. Your words through them. That we have a testimony, a testimony of rock.

And Lord, as we hear the words of Peter, the Apostle, let us hear the words of the One who sent Him, our beloved Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God. We pray in His name, Amen.