Study of Peter: rooted in God’s love

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard a Christian use the phrase to be “rooted in God’s love”? My hand is raised, even if you can’t see it. 

That sounds nice. But this truth often rushes over us in a haze, dissipating as quickly as it came. What is God’s love and how can we be rooted in it?

We’ll continue our Lukewarm Church series evaluating Peter’s Christian attributes with what it means to know God’s love. Peter knew and experienced God’s love first-hand. But how did He get about loving us in the first place? Why did God create this world and everything and everyone in it?

We have to understand a bit more of God’s heart to understand why He created us. And since He is Trinitarian, we must start there. 

Understanding the Trinity 

God exists in three persons, the Father, His Son and Holy Spirit. God is and always has been. The nature of His love is to give outwardly.

Hebrews 1:3 says “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.”

Because Their trinitarian love is reciprocal, it’s never ending. It depends on nothing. It simply exists. The Father, Son and the Holy Spirits’ love goes back and forth growing and bubbling over. For all eternity. 

So where does creation come in all of this? Since God’s love cannot be contained, He wanted to share that love through creation, so that we may join in and partake in God’s eternal, perfect love.

Michael Reeves in Delighting in the Trinity describes it beautifully, “And so, just as the Father decided to include us in His love for the Son, to share it with us, so the Son chose to include us in His love for the Father.”

Notice our role in this exchange: we do nothing. Our love for the Father and Son isn’t included in this loving exchange.

Meaning Their love for us isn’t dependent on our love for Them. And yet, as Reeves puts it, both the Father and Son include us in their reciprocal love. Joining in as a mere breath in their eternal loving exchange. 

How do we love

We have to know God’s love in order to give it. You can’t pour something out of you that isn’t inside of you. Thinking about how Peter radically spent his entire life dedicated to spreading the Gospel is incredible. But it’s only possible because Jesus sought Him first. Jesus loved Him first. And then Peter followed, and lived a life completely devoted to spreading that love to others.

One of the last recorded conversations between Jesus and Peter is found in John 21. Jesus shows through the use of repetition – which He uses frequently – the correlation between loving God and loving His people. Jesus repeatedly asks Peter, “Do you love Me?”.

The third time He asks him the same question, Peter takes it as a personal offense. There’s a poetic symbolism of Peter’s three-time denial and Jesus’ three-time question of whether or not he loved Him.

In verse 17, Peter answers again sadly, “you know that I do” to which Jesus says, “feed my sheep.” Jesus is saying, “if you love Me, you’ll love My sheep.” If you have the love of His Father, you’ll love others. As Jesus does. Jesus has His love from His Father and that’s how He’s able to love us. So He’s asking Peter to do the same. 

Shortly after Christs’ ascension, in Acts 2 we see Peter give a famous sermon the day they were given the Holy Spirit. He explains to the crowds surrounding them that the scriptures foretold what was to happen to Jesus. But, by their own choice they put the Son of God to death.

The crowds responded in verse 37, “what shall we do?” And just as Peter realized how quickly he could deny Jesus and yet be so graciously forgiven, he knows that same grace is extended to the crowds.

He explains in verse 38-39, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

I like to imagine Jesus smiling from Heaven seeing the beautiful redemption in this interaction. Peter’s sin was covered by God’s grace. And Peter obeys Jesus’ command to then shepherd His people (John 21) in a beautiful response to His love and grace. 

In Peter’s shoes, there must have been frustration and hurt by the crowds. The same people who came and were healed by Jesus, screamed for His crucifixion. Jesus was one of Peter’s closest friends, maybe even the closest. And he probably didn’t realize Jesus’ ministry on earth was going to be cut so short. And he missed Him greatly.

But Peter knew that Jesus called him to shepherd the very people who were responsible for his death. While understanding that Jesus’ death was all according to God’s plan, it still must have been very difficult for him and the other disciples to accept.

Peter easily could have given into his frustration and impatience for the crowds around them. Instead of giving into bitterness and resentfulness, he understood his own betrayal of Jesus - the weight of his own sin. This allowed him to turn around and extend that same love towards others and show them their great need for God’s grace.

A love like Jesus

God designed us to love like Him. But when we walk outside of His love, our roots are cut off from the life source only found in God. It begins to taint how we love others and we become spiteful, self-centered and greedy. And in doing so, it breeds discontentment, doubt, anxiety and opens ourselves to allow more sin to continue to grow. 

Peter is only able to extend his love because of the great love of God who loved him first. The roots of his love were firmly planted in the rich soil of God’s love. The greater Peter’s love for Jesus, the stronger he carried on His traits. The more we love Him, the more we become like Him. 

So what would it look like if we were those little sponges, where we would be walking and talking with God so much that we just absorb His words and become more like him?