John 21:19-22 This Jesus spoke, signifying by what death he would glorify God. And when He had spoken this, He said to Peter, “Follow Me.” Then Peter, turning around, saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following, who also had leaned on His breast at the supper, and said, “Lord, who is the one who betrays You?” Peter, seeing him, said to Jesus, “But Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If I will that he remain till I come, what is that to you? You follow Me.”
A rumor had spread amongst the disciples that John was Jesus favorite and that because of John’s highly favored position, he would never die. Somehow Jesus would preserve Him and not allow his favorite to ever be harmed or to perish.
Peter was apparently put off and a little irritated, even perhaps envious of John’s supposed place of honor with Jesus. Peter did what many of us do when we are irritated by someone, we naturally begin to wish that the Lord would change that person or our situation.
How many times have we thought or prayed and asked the Lord to please change someone that we know? Perhaps it is something that they often say or do that has begun to drive us crazy. Maybe it is a reoccurring problem that we continually have with a particular acquaintance.
“Lord please change that person’s behavior, I just cannot handle them any more…”
What we may not realize is that the first person that the Lord is desiring to change before someone else, is us. In fact, that constant irritation or confrontation that we are experiencing is evidence that we are the one that needs to make a change. If there was not a problem in us that needed to change, then we would most likely not feel the irritation in the first place.
The Lord may even allow us to constantly come into contact with the same kind of irritating person over and over again, just so that we begin to realize that the Holy Spirit is wanting to do a work in our heart. If we need help with the area of patience, the Lord will consistently place us in situations where we will have the opportunity to either be patient or loose our patience.
When patience has begun to take hold of us, we will begin to notice that things that once really bugged us, no longer have that same power to provoke us that they once held.
Jesus answer and solution to Peter’s concern was “mind your own business and leave the shaping of everyone else’s behavior up to me…”
Like Peter, we often get our focus on other people and forget that we may have even more personality problems than the person’s that we are focussed on. When confronted with this truth, that we are often the problem and not other people, those who have this problem will often become angry or offended. The true heart that Jesus is seeking to make in us is one where we humbly acknowledge often that we are just as much at fault as those to whom we cast blame.
Almost everything that irritates us about other people, makes us sensitive to those irritations because we ourselves have a problem in those same areas. The reason that we are so sensitive to these things in other people is that they really bug us when we see them so often in ourselves.
As we walk with Jesus today, may we repent of our judgmental attitudes over the behavior of other people and humbly acknowledge to our Lord that we are the one that we hope the Lord will change first. With that kind of attitude of humility, the Holy Spirit can begin to show us what we are truly like and begin to make us more into the image of Jesus Christ.
Rob Robinson
