Dr. Ron Sumners
June 9, 2002
The "fall" of Peter in the story of walking on water represents Peter's actual fall from faith. A fall from faith or at least a "slip" can happen to any one of us, and usually does at some point in our journey of faith!
As we develop as Christians and as ministers, these failures and slips are more likely to happen during the difficult transition period from early to later middle age, when we are smack in the middle of reassessing our pilgrimage and deciding where it is likely to lead in the years that are left.
I am convinced that man's search at midlife is ultimately a spiritual one. The search may include carnal and worldly things and pleasures, but the real purpose is to find some kind of meaning in life; and that is always a spiritual question! The "mid-life crisis" is a search for meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, most look for the answers in all the wrong places!
It is general, not particular; it happens to most all of us to some degree. The businessman, the teacher, the housewife, and the minister all have that time of falling, slipping or reassessing in their spiritual pilgrimage.
What we are doing, you see, after the period of intense activity and achievement that characterizes early middle life, is stopping to reexamine the course we are on, and to decide whether the trip has been worth it. For some, this time of life means coming to terms with the failure to achieve, with having spent all those years seeking a happiness that their chosen path can never provide. For others it means standing in the middle of a million dollar home located by the green of the golf course; with $200,000 worth of automobiles in the driveway, a membership in the country club, the admiration of many who envy their achievement and weeping for lost innocence and a realization that all they have will never fill their need! Our ultimate need is spiritual.
I have a friend who from age fifteen to fifty has been possessed by a dream of ministerial greatness. He used to send out a letter listing all his accomplishments that year: "Preached 300 times, published 15 articles, spoke on TV 50 times, visited mission fields in 5 countries, etc." It is all fluff, of course. He manages to continue from year to year in the hope that one day someone will notice how important he is to the kingdom. He is nearing the time when he must admit that his goals were more about himself than the kingdom and admit what a failure he has been. That is an extremely difficult thing to do.
The alternative is to cope with success. That too can be a sad story.
I think of another minister, one who has surely fulfilled all his life's ambitions and then some. For several years he has been the pastor of a large prestigious church; you know the kind, one with stained glass even in the bathrooms, and cloth towels to wipe your hands on. He is well known, not only in his own community, but nation-wide. I asked him a few months ago (we correspond every few months) what thoughts ran through his mind the most after reaching this stage of his ministry. "Sex and love," he wrote. Sex and love.
"I've had a devil of a time with sex these last few years," he said. "I want to put my arm around every attractive woman I see. I haven't done anything immoral, although I've had ample opportunity, but I've sure had the urge."
"By love," he wrote, "I mean this church that I have helped build." "I used to think that the ultimate was to build this building. You know the old edifice complex. Now that it is built, I think a lot about love. What good is a building if the people aren't changed? I'd like to spend the rest of my ministry teaching people how to love. If they don't learn, then what good is this magnificent building?" He had been a wonderful success as a builder but it was as if he had discovered too late that love is the goal of everything.
Maybe my friend feared he had missed something on the way to his success story, something other people were finding and taking for granted.
Henry Ward Beecher did the same thing at midlife. Riding the crest of tremendous popularity, he was a friend of President Lincoln, a celebrated preacher and author, a renowned traveler, and an idol of thousands, if not millions. And it came out in a civil trial that he had risked it all, the popularity, the riches, and the idolization, for the affection of a woman in his congregation at Plymouth Church. He had come to confuse his love for her with spirituality.
What is failure and what is success in ministry? That's the thorny question isn't it? Was Lottie Moon a failure? If you look at the world's standards for success or the present criteria for success in Southern Baptist life, she was a miserable failure! Sometimes we fail for having aimed at the wrong kind of success, and maybe, if it has helped us to avoid that pitfall, we can even conceive of failure as a kind of success. That was certainly true with Lottie Moon.
It is all confusing, especially when you are midway in the stream of life and trying to sort it all out. And sometimes the confusion leads people to cash in their chips and leave the ministry or abandon the church hoping to find "life" in an "honest" profession or a "hypocrite-less" organization.
Like one friend of mine, who had finally had enough of his own weakness as a leader and as a preacher, as well as enough of his unwilling helpmate of a wife. He divorced the church and his wife in the same week, slinking off to remarry and seek fulfillment in another kind of work. That was years ago. He is still seeking. He will never find!
I read a description of a scene of becoming honest before God not long ago. It describes Leonard Bernstein's "Mass." It moved me deeply because I could see my own struggle to be honest before God.
The celebrant who is every man has robe after Robe laid on him by others or by himself. Layer Upon layer of expectation go over him-the Constraints of obligation-until he literally staggers under the burden of all those investments laid on him. Finally, driven to extremity, in a wild and frightening scene he literally tears off the vestments, layer after layer, turning, twisting, ripping, stretching, until he stands clear and free before the altar, divested in the presence of the people under God. He has ripped off his own grave clothes to become vulnerable and real in the world.
That is strong isn't it? We feel the emotion in it, throbbing and burning.
This time of doubt and failure in our lives is part of what Paul calls walking in the flesh, in the power of our own momentum, and not in the Spirit. The works of the flesh, he says, are plain: "fornication, gross indecency and sexual irresponsibility; idolatry and sorcery; feuds and wrangling, jealousy, bad temper and quarrels, disagreements, factions, envy; drunkenness, orgies, and similar things." (Gal. 5:19-21) This is not a complete catalogue of the works of the flesh but it is an illustrative list. When we try to walk in our own strength, these are what we get.
Maybe they are the signs of weariness in the ministry, of having had enough, of having been in the piranha bowl too long. Or maybe they are the sign of not having been living in the Presence, being indwelled by the Spirit, for the fruits of the Spirit are the opposite: love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, and self-control.
That's it, isn't it? Another turning point in life, another transition period; and the only thing that saves us from going under the waves is the outstretched hand of the Master. "Here child, get in the boat." "Here son, daughter, there are more sheep to feed."
Christ is the answer, no matter how much we may dislike the cliché. There isn't another! John the Baptist's followers asked Jesus, "Are you the One, or do we look for another?" And Jesus answered, "Go tell John what you have seen, how the lame walk and the blind see and the deaf hear." It is the same for us; look back across your life and ministry. Think of all the miraculous things you have seen and been a part of. What other answer could there be. Jesus is still the One!
So, we come back again, like Simon Peter, asking forgiveness for the denials and failures and rebellions and finding reinstatement in ministry for the time that is left; not as much as there was, but enough for us to make a difference. We need to be feeding sheep, leading them beside the still waters and into green pastures for His name's sake. We come wanting the love, joy, and peace that come from walking in the Spirit, from being indwelled by the Spirit.
Who knows, maybe the end will be better than the beginning! Maybe faith will take hold even more strongly than before. That would be something, wouldn't it?
Fredrick W. Robertson found it that way. He was a great preacher. He died at thirty-seven, prematurely old and worn, his body racked with pain. He was stuff of our stuff: overworked, underpaid, the target of many accusations from both church members and strangers because he was committed to the working people. He didn't even trust the popularity that came to him. This great man was always troubled by hidden thoughts of failure, depressed on Sunday evenings by a feeling that he had not done well.
In one of the loneliest times of his life he wrote, "I read Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Coleridge for views of man to meditate upon, instead of theological caricatures of humanity; and I go to the country to feel God and I turn with disgust from everything to Christ!"
Ponder that. "I turn with disgust from everything to Christ." So, it is with all of us. In the end, what else is there? After the stormy night at sea or the toilsome night with no fish taken, we come in to the Christ of the open fire, with the fish simmering in the pan, and feel again the excitement that has grabbed our hearts all these years, ever since we were youngsters. We walk along the shore skipping rocks and hear Him ask, probing gently, "Do you love me?"
"Yes, Lord, you know I do."
"Feed my sheep."
I turn with disgust from everything to Christ! Maybe not quite with disgust, but I sure know what he means.
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