Peter trusted his own resilience. Was he not a fisherman? ‘Oh, in our profession,’ he would say to himself, ‘we have to be tough. We have to stay out there on the sea all night. We have to work until we catch something. We have to put up with the storms and the fears. We are tough people, tough stock.’ May be that was in his mind – ‘I can stand up to this.’ Maybe you have had a very hard time in the past, and there are aspects to you which are strong and resilient. Don’t trust them in the spiritual warfare. If Satan sees you trusting in your natural strengths, he makes note of it and he shakes his fist at the air, as it were, and says, ‘I demand. I am going to seize that person and shake them and prove them to be shallow and weak and phoney.’
Peter wasn’t faithful in small things. ‘Can you not watch with me for one hour?’ said the Lord. ‘Watch and pray’, and he fell asleep. He wasn’t faithful in small things and that is our downfall too. Even private devotions are skipped, missed – simple things for the Lord. If we are not faithful in small things, of course we shall crumple when the big test comes. If only he had prayed, it may never have happened! He may never have denied the Lord.
We deny him sometimes by our reactions to some passing difficulty in our place of employment and instead of being serene and having a hold on divine strength and maintaining composure and good character, we may react spitefully, testily. There are some Christians who deny him in social sin. They will even go to the pub for social drinking and do what worldlings do, under mild social pressures.
We have made loud professions. Sometimes we take up the hymnbook and sing, ‘I will be ever, only, all for Thee’! But it is sung thoughtlessly and the very next day you are not ‘ever, only, all for him’, but for self. Peter, when he made those great boasts, he should have thought more what he was saying. ‘What am I saying? I had better mean this with all my heart’ and we have to do that too. Don’t just make glib statements, promises, undertakings to the Lord – said or sung. Think about them. Pull your heart behind them and mean them and stand by them.