31 “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat. 32 But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”

33 But he replied, “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.”

34 Jesus answered, “I tell you, Peter, before the rooster crows today, you will deny three times that you know me.”  -Luke 22:31-34 

When I was a new Christian if you had asked me “Would you take a bullet in the head before denying Christ?” I would have likely answered you immediately with “yes!” Such was the felt conviction of a young believer who had almost lost both his life and his soul to despair before his conversion. To give my physical life did not seem very difficult a thing after having gone through what it had taken to make an Atheist a follower of Christ. As far as I was concerned the question itself would almost have seemed unnecessary to even be asked of me.

Years later, though, I began to realize that question might not be so easily answered. I had grown enough in my knowledge of both the Lord, and myself, to know that, to literally die for Him, I would need both the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit and a massive dose of the grace of God to give me the spiritual strength required to be a martyr.

Now some who knew me then might ascribe this change to the fact that for the first few years of my faith I did not have much in this life to lose. I was young, had few commitments to people, careers, or material things. It is true (perhaps sadly true) that I held the things of this world a bit more loosely in my early twenties than I do today in my early fifties.

That said there is something else I have realized in recent years and that is this: even as a “zealous” young Christian I would have needed the same Spirit-enabled supernatural grace of God to die for His Name then as now. You see, feelings of certainty about what we can do are often caught up in our remaining pride, including pride of a specifically spiritual kind. Even as a humbled ex-atheist my humility in 1991 was not at a level where I could yet believe I might need more than just my felt certainty and courage to put my very life on God’s altar.

I suspect the young and far more zealous believer Peter probably had not realized this yet either when he so confidently declared what he did in verse 33 of this passage. It must have been a horrific shock to find out that night before His Lord’s crucifixion that his easy self-confidence and human courage would both utterly fail him.

Good intentions are part and parcel of the Christian life. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with good intentions. Peter was no doubt absolutely sincere when he pledged to go to jail, or even taste death, for Jesus. I believe I was, too, thirty years ago, but sincerity alone is not enough. We can do nothing apart from God much less give our lives to maintain our confession of Him as Lord.

Coming to know this is part of learning humility. Peter learned this lesson the hard way that dark night and many years later did indeed die for Jesus Christ, by then a chastened man far more full of the Holy Spirit than himself.

May we all come to be what he eventually became, a person consciously and completely dependent on God’s power rather than his own, whether we are someday asked to die for the Lord physically or “just” to die to ourselves spiritually.