ALL WEATHER CONFESSORS

How easy it is to confess Jesus as Lord when the sun is warming your face and a slight  breeze makes you feel just right, and the bright blue sky is inviting you to a picnic or a walk or to read your favorite book in the shade of the back porch. What joy there is in being a fair weather confessor. But those days are not common days but special days, days to be enjoyed and remembered and hoped for. These are days which point to our eternal hope and destiny in the presence of Jesus. Eternal days that are yet ahead of us. For now we live in this present evil world, in these mortal bodies of sin, in the consequences of our own sin and the sin of others around us compounded into an anti-Jesus world atmosphere. And in this unholy atmosphere we are called to confess Jesus as Lord by deed and word and attitude not by compulsion but in love that we are to renew in the presence of our beloved Jesus each day. And this we must do on the peril of not being an all weather confessor of Jesus our Lord.
Peter is an example to us in this respect. "Peter answered him, 'Though they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away'". (Matthew 26.32) Peter had just shared in a wonderful communion with Jesus and the disciples. The future looked bright and promising. The weather was fair for confessing allegiance to Jesus. But that soon changed with the happenings in Gethsemane, the betrayal of Jesus, his arrest, and the trial before Caiaphas and the Council. A servant girl came up to Peter and said to him, "You were with Jesus the Galilean". And Peter denied it before them all saying, "I do not know what you mean". And then a second time, "I do not know the man". And then finally invoking a curse on himself and swearing, "I do not know the man". (Matthew 26.69-75)

Before we condemn Peter too harshly we need to see that we too can easily be fair weather confessors, not so much by deliberate denial but by convenient conformity to our circumstances. Peter would have been happy to sit and watch the proceedings on the trial of Jesus but when called out, deliberately denied his Lord. We too are too often content to watch and hope we are not challenged to confess, content to live in avoidance in our workplaces and playplaces and errandplaces. God calls us to be witnesses of Christ in deed, attitude, and word like lights shining in a dark world. (Philippians 2.14-16) Choose to be an all weather confessor of Jesus as Lord.

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