These are the critical points when faith can fail, but our verse reminds us that it He is praying. We have the prayers of the Son of God to sustain faith in these dark moments. Within this is a promise — when we return to Jesus. Not if, when. The purpose of sifting wheat is not to destroy it but to remove the chaff — the dust, husks, and impurities.
While the sifting process is uncomfortable and even painful, but it is effective. When we are sifted as wheat there is an assurance that we will emerge free from impurities. This is what happens when we overcome our crisis of faith and return to Jesus.
The weaknesses are removed, the failures are shaken away, and our faith shines with His light and love. This promise is our assurance that we will overcome. The moment we turn our eyes back to Him is the moment we begin to return to Him. The closing phrase of our verse reminds us that as followers of Christ, we have the responsibility to serve Him.
Nothing that happens in our lives — good or bad — is ever only for ourselves. Our experience will help others in their journey, and God empowers us through our trials to equip us to strengthen others.
Jesus said that when we return we must strengthen others. This responsibility is what empowers our struggle with supernatural kingdom power. Our victory in Christ is therefore multiplied.
It adds powerful value to what we have gone through. Lord Jesus, thank You for Your faithfulness and grace which sustains us in all adversity. Thank You for the assurance that our sovereign God is always in control. Remind us always that our victory in You is a kingdom victory to be shared and multiplied.
Help us to be willing to reach out and strengthen others with the faith and truth that You have imparted to us. As the comment goes knowledge is power! Thank You so much from the bottom of my heart!
This knowledge helps keep you holding on while trying to make it through the pain, the fire and the valleys! I can say for these past four years I have been broken I lost the person I loved the most in this world , crushed and now sifted! This truly helps Blessings Always!!! Read on to learn more about what is the purpose of sifting wheat. Threshing can be performed in many different ways.
One traditional way is to spread the harvested wheat out on a hard surface. A floor made of concrete, brick, stone or even tamped earth will do. After the wheat has been spread, it is beaten with a club or flail. In these places, people must use manpower to accomplish the task. This interesting video shows one ancient method of threshing using donkeys and tumbling children to knock the grain loose from the stalks.
Be sure to look below the video for a very thorough description of the process. After wheat has been threshed, it is winnowed. God breaks down the outer shell of a person, so the real seed of life can remain. This man was not a fearful man. He was a confrontational man, and he even declared that he was willing to die for Jesus.
He was also very sure of his love for Jesus. Peter may have felt like a pebble after the sifting was completed, but He was spiritually much stronger than ever before because the outer shell of self-confidence and pride was broken off of him. When Jesus was arrested, many left him because they feared persecution, but Peter followed where Jesus was taken. When asked if he knew Jesus, fear set in.
The giant had turned into a grasshopper! The lion had turned into a sheep!! But you see Jesus had given permission to the enemy to do this to Peter. Jesus knew that before Peter could shepherd His flock, Peter needed a good understanding of what it meant to be a sheep.
All his life he had ridden on his confrontational strength to get the job done!! He was rough, he was abrasive, and he was impulsive! However, the work Jesus had for him while it certainly had a confrontational dimension, also required humility, gentleness, dependency on the Lord, and an understanding of human frailty. He could not believe himself denying the one he loved. How could he be such a coward!? He probably thought he disappointed Jesus and that Jesus made a mistake by picking him.
Why would he want cowards to be his disciples and leaders? Jesus had already told him that Peter was going to deny him three times before the rooster crowed. Jesus knew if you were going to be His leader, you must understand your true nature! A mature person knows their limitations. His tears of penitence are genuine. He is such an one as may be prayed for. There is material in him to work upon. The life of the soul is not extinct.
The Divine breath will fan it into a flame again. He weeps, and bitter are his tears, As bitter as his words were base, As urgent as the sudden fears Which even love refused to face. O, love so false and yet so true, O, love so eager yet so weak, In these sad waters born anew Thy tongue shall yet in triumph speak.
Thou livest, and the boaster dies, Dies with the night that wrought his shame; Thou livest, and these tears baptize— Simon, now Peter is thy name. A rock, upon Himself the Rock Christ places thee this awful day; Him waves assault with direful shock, And cover thee with maddening spray. But safe art thou, for strong is He: Eternal Love all love will keep: The sweet shall as the bitter be; Thou shalt rejoice as thou dost weep.
Lynch, The Rivulet, Our Lord did not ask for Peter that he might be exempted from temptation, but simply that his faith should not fail. Faith meant everything to Peter. It was the foundation on which all that was good and noble in his character was built up. And the trial went to strengthen his faith. The sifting time formed a turning-point in his spiritual history: the sifting process had for its result a second conversion, more thorough than the first—a turning from sin, not merely in general, but in detail: from besetting sins, in better informed if not more fervant repentance, and with a purpose of new obedience, less self-reliant, but just on that account more reliable.
A child hitherto—a child of God indeed, yet only a child—Peter became a man strong in grace, and fit to bear the burden of the week. The bone that is broken is stronger, they tell us, at the point of junction, when it heals and grows again, than it ever was before. And it may well be that a faith that has made experience of falling and restoration has learned a depth of self-distrust, a firmness of confidence in Christ, a warmth of grateful love which it would never otherwise have experienced.
Then, when he had passed through that terrible night, when he had been lifted up again, when he had crept back to the feet of his risen Lord and had been forgiven and reinstated, he had double cause for gratitude—that he himself had been saved from hopeless wreck and restored, and, still more, that he was now a better man, prepared, in a higher sense than before, to be an apostle and a patient, helpful friend to others in similar trial.
Peter had now the qualifications for strengthening the brethren. He has known by experience the unforgetting, rescuing love of the Christ—the grace of God. O, what a reality it comes to be when a man has lost the chaff of himself and feels that he himself is freer to be and to grow! Pentecost rings yet with the eloquence of that once broken heart of Peter. Hope in Christ? What a certainty did it have to him! Jacob the supplanter had been made Israel—Prince of God; and now Peter was sifted out of Simon—sifted out with an experience which made him a ceaseless strengthener of men.
When Peter sank into the depths, his self-confidence was broken. He did not speak. There are times when words are not wanted—times, perhaps, when real feeling cannot speak. Christ simply looked at Peter—a look which told of real sorrow and real love, and had in it something of the reproach that a great love, when deeply wounded, must feel.
It was enough. So he went for those three days, we know not whither, into solitude, till John found him and brought him to the tomb on Easter morning; but in those silent hours the work was done. His mind went back over the old story. He came to himself. The past lived again, as it does in such moments. How often he had been betrayed by his self-confident temper; how again and again it had led him into sin and shame; how ling before he had boldly cast himself into the lake, only to fail, at the critical moment, in showing any real faith.
How strange! When a number of men are joined together in carrying on an enterprise of this sort, any weakness or wavering on the part of their leader is commonly fatal to the whole undertaking. Here the very contrary was to happen. A pious man who has been betrayed into a great fall cannot recover himself in such a manner as to place himself only in the same situation as before he fell.
He will be more earnest, more zealous, more watchful over himself, more anxious for the honour of God, than ever before.
He will feel a desire, especially if his offence has been public and notorious, to make amends, humanly speaking, for the scandal he has brought upon religion. And not only is he disposed to promote the glory of God by stablishing or strengthening his brethren; he is also more qualified to do so.
So it was with Peter. He did not rest satisfied with strengthening and entrenching his own position; he made it the great object of his life and labours to warn, to admonish, to exhort, and to stablish his brethren.
We can see the evidence of this in his speeches, as recorded in the Book of Acts; we can see it also in his two Epistles, which we may regard as his legacy to the Church, his testamentary reparation for the scandal of his fall. Philip, The Evangel in Gowrie, The Scriptures lighted up, Christian joy displaced depression, passion for souls ensued, courage triumphed over fear in public religious exercises. Other people also recognized the realness of the change, and the whole providential course of life since has corroborated the divineness of the vision of that night.
About that time the college was broken up through the occurrence of a case of smallpox among the students, and I went home. Lead them to Christ. The first visit I made was characterized by a soul-contest of hours resulting in the conversion of a young woman.
That led to another and that to others until an entire Bible class of influential young persons surrendered to Christ. From that the work so spread that ere the summer was over nearly all the persons named in my note-book were converted and added to the several churches of the town. He was in Rome—so the story runs—in the Neronian persecution.
His faith failed. He fled from the city. But at the gate of the city he met the sacred form of his Master. He said to Him, Domine, quo vadis? Peter understood the words. He, too, turned back. He entered the city again. He was martyred there.
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