Q4, S09 Feed My Sheep
Quarter 4, Session 9: Feed My Sheep
DO YOU LOVE ME?
Passage
John 21
Concept
This session falls under Jesus’ twelfth question: Do you love me? At the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus approached Peter and asked him three times if he loved him. This perfectly sums up the message of the Gospels as we see Peter confronted with the same question we face: After all of this, do you love me? And once Peter affirmed that he does love Jesus, he was called to feed the sheep, to continue the work he had been pursuing from the very beginning with Jesus.
Key Question
After everything you’ve read and discussed in this Twelve study, how would you answer Jesus’ question to Peter: “Do you love me?” How have you found yourself following your love for Jesus into areas you wouldn’t naturally choose to go?
The Sheep Tool
Do you see our Sheep tool being played out in John 21? With whom? How so?
Feed My Sheep
How do you deal with failure? We all make mistakes, we all fall short of our expectations for ourselves and of others’ expectations for us. We all certainly fall short of being everything God has made us to be. Failure is inevitable. We encounter it often.
So the question is not, “What if I fail?” but “What will I do when I fail?” Failure forces us to take stock of where our hearts are really at. It gives us an opportunity to evaluate where we’ve been, what went wrong, and where we’d actually like to be. When we get angry or start blaming other people, we are basically wasting our failure. But if we can capitalize on these moments, then we are free to grow.
In John 21, we get a picture of Peter coming face to face with his failure of denying Jesus three times. For Peter, it wasn’t a question of rubbing his nose in his failure; it was all about where he was going to go from this point.
1. Read John 21. Right off the bat, what strikes you about this passage? What do you find interesting or challenging or confusing?
Responding to Failure
During the Last Supper (recorded in John 13–17), Jesus told Peter that he would deny Jesus three times (John 13:36–38). A little later in the evening, this is exactly what happened (John 18:15–18, 25–27). It’s easy to get on Peter, but in Jesus’ crucifixion, all of the disciples had separated from Jesus. They had followed him around in his ministry for three years, and now they were all backpedaling, even running the other direction.
In John 21, Jesus approached Peter once again after his resurrection. When we first meet Peter at the beginning of the Gospels, he was fishing. Here at the end of the Gospels, he was back to fishing again. He had returned to where he started, almost as if the whole adventure with Jesus never took place. Here at the end of John’s Gospel, Peter seems unsure about his role in the future of what Jesus was doing.
What we’re seeing with Peter happens to all of us. Life is often cyclical, where we find ourselves once again in the same places we thought we had left behind. How does our failure affect our view of how God will use us? How does it affect our relationship with him? When we fail, it’s easy for us to doubt that we can still be used by God. It’s easy to let that failure stand as an excuse for remaining distant from him.
We experience so many disappointments with our churches. We often feel disappointment with God. But this is another kind of disappointment that is often the most painful: disappointment with ourselves. It’s difficult to know that we have failed. When we fail in our commitment to follow Jesus, we feel huge disappointment. How do we handle that? What does it look like to move on? To get back on our feet? To be used by God once again?
When we find ourselves in cycles, we believe the lie that because we are situationally in the same spot, nothing that has transpired matters. How can we still be dealing with the same stuff? But finding ourselves in the same situation does not mean we are the same people. We are different people because we’ve been growing, we’ve been on a journey. We see with new eyes. The point is that God is doing something.
Life goes on, so the question is not whether or not we will go on, it’s a question of whether or not we will continue with Jesus. This is the question Peter was facing: would he go on as a fisherman, or go on as a disciple of Jesus?
2. What are some of the ways you find yourself distancing from Jesus or failing him in what he’s calling you to do?
3. How have you been doing at responding well to that failure?
Reaffirming Love
Jesus framed the question of whether Peter would continue with him by asking: “Do you love me?” Jesus repeated it three times to show how important the question is. It’s significant because this is the culmination of the Gospels. It’s where everything has led. Jesus asked three times because Peter denied him three times: it’s as if Jesus was undoing Peter’s denial. He was giving him three chances to affirm his love when prior to this he had three times denied his love.
This would have been a reminder of his failure, but Peter didn’t avoid it. He owned it. He was hurt, but he didn’t fight back. So much of the aftermath of our failure is us trying to avoid Jesus, trying to continue placing blame elsewhere, trying to show why God or everyone else is wrong. Peter’s response is instructive. He simply repeated each time he was asked: “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
Peter had failed many times before, but he continued to follow. He continued to jump out of boats to walk on the water with Jesus. He continued to accept Jesus’ call to love him and follow him and continue in the work of feeding his sheep. Though Peter was not perfect, he’s a great model of how to handle failure. So how do you handle it? Do you hide? Or do you take it on the chin and keep going like Peter does here?
4. Right now, before you move on, how can you stop and address this failure and get back to following Jesus?
Reengaging the Mission
Jesus shows Peter that loving him will mean continuing to do the things they have been doing together from the very beginning: feeding sheep. We understand that God is a forgiving God, but the real hurdle for us is to reengage in the work he has given us to do. So much of the hurdle is just knowing how to reengage. Our failures do not negate the call to feed sheep, to love the people God has placed around us. Ultimately, loving God and loving other people are not separate things. Receiving life and giving life go together. Jesus asks if Peter loves him, and immediately sends him to love others. The two are linked.
Jesus’ call to Peter ends with an interesting statement about being led in his old age. It comes down to this. When you’re young, you have a lot of freedom. As you get older, you gain more and more responsibility and you end up doing things you’re constrained or committed to do rather than simply what seems enjoyable at the moment. Often when we first meet Jesus, we feel a lot of excitement and freedom. But as we grow, we realize we have a lot of responsibility, a calling to do things that we wouldn’t naturally choose to do. Peter will be led by the hand to places he doesn’t want to go, and ultimately that means that Peter will follow Jesus to the point of being killed on his behalf. The call is to stick with Jesus, to follow him even when it pulls us away from what feels safe and comfortable and natural.
This passage is a beautiful reminder of everything that we’ve seen in this study. It reminds of what it means to love Jesus. If we love him, that love will lead us to new places. It will often lead us away from what is comfortable. The question is: Will we follow him? And more fundamentally, the question is: Do we love him?
5. After everything you’ve read and discussed in this Twelve study, how would you answer Jesus’ question to Peter: “Do you love me?”
6. How have you found yourself following your love for Jesus into areas you wouldn’t naturally choose to go?
7. If you love Jesus, where do you see that love leading you in this season of your life?
8. Spend some time in prayer. Take some time to acknowledge your failure and to reaffirm your love for Jesus. Ask him to guide you in what it looks like to continue to reengage the mission he has laid out in front of you.
Key Question
After everything you’ve read and discussed in this Twelve study, how would you answer Jesus’ question to Peter: “Do you love me?” How have you found yourself following your love for Jesus into areas you wouldn’t naturally choose to go?