We are finishing up Matthew 26 today with this cheery story. Peter denies any association with Jesus. I so appreciate stories like these because it is evidence that this is a real story. It really happened. No made up religion would paint its first chief apostle in this way. But this is a real story and we get to see how it played out. 

We often talk about expositional preaching. That’s the way we teach here. But, the word can often get defined wrong. It’s not line by line teaching the way some describe it. It’s making the main point of the passage the main point of the sermon. That’s what expositional preaching means. You can do this with a verse, a paragraph, a chapter, a whole book of the Bible, or the whole Bible itself. All of which we have done. 

In some cases, when pastors preach verse by verse, you can lose the forest for the trees. You can gain some great insight this way, but at the same time you can lose the main point of the passage. And this passage is one of those passages that we have to make sure we see in context. We have to remember that Peter’s denial of Jesus happens just after Jesus told him he would do it. Peter promised Jesus that he would never deny him, but Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this very night you will deny me three times before the rooster crows.”

We also need to see the way this passage comes right after the trial before the Jewish leaders and right before Judas killing himself. All of this is hugely important to Matthew and we will see why, but right now, I want to focus on Peter promising Jesus that he will never deny him and that same very day denying Jesus three times. 

Why couldn’t Peter keep his promise to Jesus? Why can’t we? Why can’t we keep promises to other people? Why do some of us struggle to make any promise-like commitments to other people? To understand this passage, not only do we need to see it in its context, we also need to understand the nature of promises. Specifically, 1) How promises shape us and 2) why we can make promises. 

1. How promises shape us

The act of making and keeping or making and breaking promises form and shape us in some very significant ways. I want to see three of these ways from this passage. First, keeping promises makes us humble. In Psalm 15, King David asks the question O LORD, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who shall dwell on your holy hill? -Psalm 15:1 and there is more in that chapter than we have time to cover, but one of the things he says is this person is someone …who honors those who fear the Lord; who swears to his own hurt and does not change. -Psalm 15:4b

It’s hard to keep a promise. It will require sacrifice, it will mean, at times, being hurt. Think about the promises you make when you get married. You don’t promise to do things only when they are easy, but when they are hard. When Angela and I made our vows twenty years ago, despite what I said, all I heard was for better, for richer, and in health. I didn’t think about cancer, heart attacks, financially hard times, or times we just felt like we were missing each other completely. But those times come. And the only way to keep those promises is if we are living for something bigger than ourselves, our comforts, and our immediate desires. And that is the essence of humility. It isn’t just having a low view of yourself. That can turn into martyr syndrome or masochism which is actually pride because you think you are better than everyone else because of the ways you sacrifice. 

Humility is having something or someone more important than yourself that puts you in your proper lower perspective. That causes you to think, act, and live more for that more important thing than your own interests. In the case of wedding vows, we vow to love for worse, for poorer, and in sickness because we are committing to put someone else ahead of ourselves: the spouse. We are declaring that the relationship is more important than our immediate desires. And the more we do that, the more humble we become. 

And that’s just marriage, what about promises to Jesus? When we live for the God of the universe who is only good all the time through every trial we will experience in this life, that has a humbling effect. When we make commitments to God and keep them when it is hard, it reinforces how big, good, and perfect He is and it puts us in our proper place. Over and over and over again. And when we break promises over and over and over, we are saying that we are the most important person in every relationship. 

And we can see that Peter was on a bad path. In chapter 18 he was a part of the argument about who would be the greatest in the kingdom of God. And in the beginning of this chapter when Jesus told the disciples that they will fall away, what did Peter say in verse 33? “Though they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away.” Can you hear the pride? They might fall away, but I’m better, I’m stronger, I will never leave you. That’s when Jesus tells Peter that he will deny him three times this very night. But, Peter doubles down in verse 35, “Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you.” Can you hear Peter’s arrogance? You are wrong Jesus! I’m stronger than you think. Pride was already consuming Peter. Peter was already putting himself above other people and that is the perfect formula for not keeping promises when things get hard. 

Then, the second way promises shape us: They make us whole. Another way to say this is that they give us integrity. The word "integrity" comes from the Latin word "integritas," which means wholeness or completeness. The word ‘integrity’ comes from "integer," meaning whole. It means that you are not duplicitous. You aren’t one person in one crowd and a different person in another crowd. 

One of my favorite stories ever was when I was with one of my best friends, Kevin, in Atlanta. Kevin is actually the guy who led me to the Lord. We were in Atlanta for a conference in late December of 2004 and the Miami Hurricanes were there to play in the Peach Bowl. Larry Coker was their head coach at the time. Kevin and I were in the hotel elevator and he was telling me how much he hated the Hurricanes and didn’t care who they played, he just wanted Miami to lose. At that very moment, the elevator stopped and guess who got in. Larry Coker. And Kevin introduced himself and said, “Coach, I just want to tell you what a big fan I am of yours and the team and I really hope y’all win your bowl game!” My jaw dropped and my eyes were as wide as they could be! And as soon as Larry got off that elevator, Kevin’s head dropped and he said, “I know! I’m terrible! I don’t know why I said that. Coach Coker was there and it all just came out!”

Now, that’s more of a funny story than a serious one, but that quick elevator ride made him feel less whole. It chipped away at his integrity. So how much more would that be the case for Peter? Peter isn’t surrounded by Jesus and the disciples anymore. The disciples are gone and Peter is following Jesus from a distance. A servant girl came up to him saying Peter was with Jesus and Peter denied it saying, “I don’t know what you mean.” Then, another servant girl saw him and made the same accusation. Peter then denied Jesus in an even stronger way, making an oath that he did not know the man. Then, some bystanders came up to Peter and said they could tell by Peter’s accent that he was Galilean and a part of Jesus’ group. Peter then denied Jesus even more emphatically, invoking a curse on himself if he was lying and swearing that he did not know Jesus. So not only is Peter not keeping his promise to Jesus, he is promising that he never knew Jesus. And that is when the rooster crowed and it all hit Peter like a crushing blow.

And what is the result? Peter is wrecked. He’s weeping bitterly. His integrity has failed. He’s less of a whole person and he feels it. You see, keeping our promises builds our integrity and the result is that we are more of a whole person. We are the same regardless of what crowd we are in even if that brings challenges into our lives. 

I want to say something to the middle schoolers and high schoolers. It is so challenging to walk with integrity when there are so many different crowds who have very different expectations and desires for you. When I look back at my high school time, I wish I could have walked with integrity better. When I was with the athletes, I wanted to be athletic, when I was with the drinking crowd, I wanted to be seen as cool, when I was with the Christian crowd, I wanted to be seen as moral. And the result of living like a chameleon, becoming whatever I thought I needed to be to fit into different crowds, was exhaustion and a deep insecurity that who I was wasn’t enough. I don’t want that for you. I want you to have the security of knowing who you are regardless of what crowd you are in. You’ll like yourself more and you’ll sleep much better because you will feel more whole. 

Then, third, promises create community. It’s no coincidence that Peter wept alone. Matthew says that he went out. He was ashamed and wanted to be alone. Breaking promises isolates you. Not only do you feel ashamed and insecure, but others won’t trust you. Sometimes you see people who decide they aren’t going to make any promises, any commitments to anyone because they don’t want to be bound in any way. Well, that’s just as isolating. When we make commitments to other people and keep them even when it causes us harm, it builds trust. 

I have a good friend named Steve Schrimsher. I can say his name because this was in the news. He and his wife faithfully supported us when we were on staff with Campus Crusade and they prayed for us by name every morning. Around 2008, his business partner killed himself and it came out that Steve’s partner had embezzled a huge amount of money. I think it was somewhere near $8 million. All of this money belonged to investors who expected it back with interest. Steve’s lawyers told him he didn’t have to pay them back because it wasn’t his fault, but Steve spent the next decade paying every one of them back every cent. What do you think keeping a promise like this did for Steve’s community? It deepend it significantly. The trust people have in him now is greater than if he had never gone through that trial. His community is so much deeper. Keeping promises when they hurt results in a sense of community that is more valuable than avoiding the pain. 

We are designed to live in community. We aren’t designed to be loners. Our triune God, who we are made in the image of, exists in perfect community: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Before the creation of the world, God was perfectly happy in Himself. And God has invited us into that community with Him and with other believers. He saves individuals into communities of faith. We get to carry out the one anothers in Scripture. Depending on how you count them, there are about 66 one anothers that we carry out  with each other and, as we do, we grow as a community. And do you know what the one anothers are? Promises. Promises to each other that we will love each other, guard each other, support each other, care for each other, and encourage each other even when it’s hard to do so. 

I tell this story in every Discover OGC class, but in my former church, there was a woman named Amanda who came to faith and then joined our church. Amanda came with significant needs. Material needs, emotional needs, mental health needs. And the church loved her so well. She would be in our homes washing her clothes, we cared for her kids, we paid her bills when she needed, we bought her groceries, we prayed with her, and we discipled her. And after two years, she took her life. I remember being at her funeral and there was this overwhelming feeling of was all that worth it? We invested so much and this is how it ends. Then, the pastor, JD Shaw, stood up and said, “Amanda taught us how to love.” 

And it just hit me like a ton of bricks. He was so right. Because we got to live in community with her keeping the promises of the one anothers to someone who wasn’t easy and wasn’t someone we would have naturally befriended outside of the church, we had grown in love. We had grown in humility, we had grown in wholeness, and all of us had grown in community. We had actually received more from Amanda than she had from us. 

Those are the benefits of keeping our promises. How promises shape us. But we haven’t yet looked at the heart of promise keeping. How can we keep our promises? How can we willingly make hard promises to each other? That’s the second part. 

1. How we can make promises

Keeping promises is hard! I don’t want to make it sound easy because it’s not. It’s especially hard when people have not kept their promises to you. When you have been taken advantage of. Or, maybe you are the one who let someone else down. Maybe you are the one who took advantage of others. Maybe you are the one who bailed on your promises when things got tough for you. You may really identify with Peter here. 

But, we know the end of Peter’s story. Peter became one of the most influential people to ever live. Peter lost his life because of his promise keeping to Jesus. So what changed? Peter understood and embraced three things. I’m loosely pulling on something Tim Keller wrote in the 90’s here, but we can make promises when we understand what Jesus has promised us. We can make promises because Jesus promised to judge, because Jesus promised to die, and because Jesus promised to forgive. 

First, Jesus promised to judge. Jesus is going to make everything right one day. If you don’t believe that…if you believe that this life is all there is, you’ll have little motivation to make or keep promises. The nature of a promise is delayed gratification. And there is no greater delay on gratification than into the next life. The promises you make could cause flourishing and they could cause trials. They could get you promoted and they could get you fired. They could make you money and they could lose you money. They could cause harmony in your family and they could cause strife in your family. And Jesus tells us that’s ok. It will all work out in the end. As the ultimate Judge, Jesus is going to judge all wrongdoing in the world, but there is something deeper that Matthew wants us to see. 

Here is where the context comes back into play. Matthew is creating this contrast between Peter in the crowd and Jesus in the trial in the previous passage. Both Jesus and Peter are interrogated. Jesus by his enemies, the high priests, and Peter by the high priests servants. Both Jesus and Peter give oaths affirming what they are saying is true. But, Jesus’ oath is true and Peter’s is false. Peter breaks his promise so he doesn’t have to endure a trial, but Jesus keeps his promise which means he will go to the cross. 

Matthew wants us to see that Jesus is faithful even when we are unfaithful. He wants us to see that Jesus keeps his promise to be judged in our place so we don’t have to be judged for our promise breaking. And Jesus’ promise keeping ensures that we will spend eternity in heaven with him where no promises will be hard and no promises will be broken. And because of this, we can endure people breaking their promises to us, we can make promises that are hard, and we can keep promises when they bring challenges. 

This takes us to the second reason we can make promises: Jesus promised to die. Also in Matthew 26 we have the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus prayed that if this cup could be taken from him that it would. That is, the cup of God’s wrath. Jesus’ divine nature knew what needed to happen, but his human nature was terrified. But Jesus was the same person in every crowd. He was perfectly whole, he had perfect integrity. And keeping his promise to the Father meant he would be forsaken on the cross. It’s really counter to how promises work if you think about it. God the Son perfectly keeps his promise to God the Father and the result is that God the Son is crushed by the wrath of God the Father on the cross. The Promise Keeper was punished as a promise breaker. 

Do you know what that makes Jesus? The scapegoat. Do you know where that word comes from? It comes from Leviticus 16 talking about the Day of Atonement. On that day, every year, the high priest laid his hands on a goat and that goat would symbolically take on the sins of the people and be sent into the wilderness. The term scapegoat came in William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible in 1530 by combining the words ‘escape’ and ‘goat.’ This ritual existed to create a category for what Jesus would do. It wasn’t that the goat saved them, the goat helped them (and us) understand how we would be saved. Jesus would die to take on all the sins of his people. 

The Israelite people were promise breakers. They broke promises to God and to each other and the goat symbolically took on the punishment of being exiled from the community. Likewise, we are promise breakers and Jesus literally took on the punishment of exile for us. He was exiled outside of the city where he was crucified and on the cross exiled from community with God the Father and God the Spirit that he had always experienced so we could be brought into that community. Jesus keeps the ultimate promise at the ultimate cost so we can be forgiven our promise breaking. And if that’s true, we have more fuel to make and keep promises to others. 

Then, third, Jesus promised to forgive. It’s no coincidence that three times Peter denied Jesus and after the resurrection, Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?”...three times. What changed Peter so much? Peter realized that Christianity isn’t about us keeping all our promises because we can’t do that. Peter swore with an oath that he would not deny Jesus and he failed. And so will we. Peter realized that Christianity is about God keeping his promises to us. Promises of forgiveness. But what is counterintuitive about this is that when we realize it’s not about our faithfulness to Jesus, but his to us, we become more faithful people. When we realize that we aren’t saved by our promise keeping, but saved by Jesus’ promise keeping, we actually become better at making and keeping promises. The best promise keepers are the ones who know they can’t do it perfectly and are willing to repent quickly. 

And when we realize the promises given to us in Jesus, it makes us more willing to swear to our hurt and not change. It might also make us more careful in what we promise to do. It will give us more forgiveness toward others when they break their promises to us and it will make us more forgiving toward ourselves when we fail in ours. 

This is what Peter realized. And I think we see the beginning of this realization with his bitter weeping. This is repentance. It’s the exact opposite of what Matthew is going to show us next with Judas. I don’t want to steal much of Robert’s thunder for next week, but simply say that Judas broke his promise and ran from Jesus and that broke him. Peter, though, broke his promise to Jesus and ran to him. Matthew wants us to see this. And because he ran to Jesus in deep repentance, he found forgiveness. Peter’s fall was temporary, but Judas’ was permanent. Judas cried tears of remorse, but Peter cried tears of repentance. Judas’ tears were the tears of death. But, Peter’s tears were the tears of life. Instead of being broken like Judas, Peter was filled with Jesus.