Amen. If you turn back to the front side, you'll see we're in the 31st verse of the 22nd chapter of the Gospel of Luke. We'll be reading verses 31 to 34. This is God's word to us this afternoon. Jesus speaking, verse 31. Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. Peter said to him, Lord, I am ready to go with you both to prison and to death. And Jesus said to him, I tell you, Peter, the rooster will not crow this day until you deny three times that you know me. The book of Job, as I'm sure most everyone in here probably knows, opens with a glimpse into the throne room of God. It's one of the few places where we're allowed to go in and see the proceedings in a way that's understandable to us that happened in God's presence, and there we are We're privileged to, as it were, overhear a conversation between God and the sons of God, the angels, as they come to present themselves before Him. And there is one angel that we're introduced to who is called the adversary, Satan, who introduces himself to the Lord. And he, it seems as we're reading through the book, seeks an opportunity against the man the book's named after, Job. And you will remember it is not Satan that thinks of Job first, but rather the Lord is the one that brings up Job in this throne room. He says, have you seen my servant Job? So God, it seems, offers Job to the adversary, Satan's scrutiny. He's the one that brings him up and the devil takes the bait. He demands from God to have him. And here again in our text, another very similar conversation seemingly is presented to us. We don't hear the exchange directly, but are told about it by one who seems party to the interaction. He seems to be one who was there and heard what was going on. Jesus announces to Simon Peter that Satan has asked to do to him what he once asked to do to Job. He demands him so that he might sift him like wheat. And then follows a dialogue between Peter and the Lord where we learn that what Peter experiences is something that is in fact given from above and ordered for him by God's love toward him in Christ. As the hem writer so fittingly captures it, every joy or trial, it falls from above and it's traced upon our dial by the son of love. What is true of Peter here, then, is true of all of us. His trial, our trials, are sent from above for our own good, that we might, as Jesus prays for Peter here, strengthen our brethren. Remember, Peter is the apostle that writes to the brethren, don't be surprised by the fiery trial which is to try you when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you. No, our trials are a shared experience that is common to us all. Peter writes to tell us that as one who has experienced it and who we read about here. In verse 31, the text indicates to us that this experience that is Peter's directly is meant to be something that is experienced by us all. Jesus calls Simon's attention to it. He says, Simon, Simon, behold, pay attention, take close notice. Satan demanded to have you. Most of the modern translations, my Bible right here adds a little note right there where the you is, a little superscript, and it points down to the bottom and tells us that the you there is in fact a plural you. It is you all. Satan doesn't just in this way request Simon alone, but he's requesting all. All of you, all the disciples, and Simon included, obviously, among them. All those who share the profession of faith with Peter seem to be in mind in the devil's request. He wants all those who say of Jesus, you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life." You see, Satan is here presented to us as a roaring lion who seeks to devour all such men and women who, with Peter, confess Jesus as the Christ. He demands you, plural, all of you, So this text has practical application then to any and all of you today who are seated here who share that profession with Peter and with me and with all the saints. And notice further that the request is past tense. Satan, it says, demanded. He doesn't demand presently, but demanded Before, Jesus calls your attention to something then that has already occurred. He means you to understand that what you experience now has reference to that conversation in the past. The shape of your present conversation has its roots in a heavenly dialogue that is finished. It's over. And surprisingly, it seems that the dialogue concludes with God granting Satan the very thing that he asks for. Satan asks that he might have you all, Simon, the disciples, all the saints, every Christian, and God says, done. Go ahead. You have my permission. But notice the request is also very specific and therefore limited. Satan is not giving the disciples into his hand carte blanche. He does not have license to do whatever he wants to in any way he pleases, but rather he's allowed only that for which he asks, which is specifically this, to sift them like wheat. And of course, we sift wheat in order to remove foreign particles from the wheat. You know, rocks and dirt and leaves and things might get into the wheat in the process of harvesting it, and so you pass it through a sieve to get out those foreign particles. You sift to purify and to refine wheat. The devil has malicious intent in this sifting process, but God does not. See, Satan would accuse you of being part of those foreign things in the mixture of the wheat that needs to be taken out so that the wheat might be purified and kept from your defilement. He knows and accuses you of sin. You are a sinner, he would say, and therefore have no part in the wheat that is God's. He wishes to catch sinners in the sieve. But God intends to use the same instrument to shape sinners into saints. He aligns His will, God does, with the adversary for your good. We're taught it here. In God's good pleasure, the evil plot in His hands becomes a stage for His almighty grace. He means to strengthen your faith, not to destroy it or to catch it in some unexpected trap, like Satan. And I think that that is a hint at the almighty power of God, that He's able to say yes to Satan and yes to you at the same time, even though Satan means your harm. He is in command here. Satan is bound to ask permission. He can't just go and do, without permission, anything he wants. He dares not move or do anything to the saints or to anyone of his own accord. He asks and only does what God allows. And so God here is powerful, and I think that that should be an encouragement to us in some manner. God is almighty, even over the devil. But there is something more that makes that idea even more encouraging to us. The God who is powerful is also a God who is not distant from us. He's not far off, not at all. For he who permits the sifting is also the one who will be himself sifted. He who from his throne granted the permission is also the one who as a man will intercede. It doesn't say it plainly, but clearly I think Jesus sets himself in the place of the one who fielded that devilish request in the first place. He was the one who was there. He speaks as one who heard the words and gave the permission to Satan when he demanded it. And so he shares in that way, with his words and his description, the almighty power. He is able to parry the thrust of the devil, you might say. He says, Satan demanded, but I, when he demanded, I was there. I heard it. I permitted him. I gave him power over you, but with the knowledge that I would stand in place of you all as one of you. Almighty God, near to us, Satan demanded, but I, Jesus said, God grants and God in man intercedes. We see something of this in the prophet Zechariah, another one of these glimpses into the throne room of God when Satan is presented before the throne of the Lord and the Lord says to Satan, the Lord rebuke you. The Lord says the Lord rebuke you. The Lord who gives the devil audience is the same one who will stand up in the gap against the rebuke or to rebuke Satan. The Almighty comes down and He shares our infirmities and knows our weakness. He stands in the middle. As a mediator, He makes of Satan's plot a plot to perfect you. The instrument meant for your harm is transformed in Christ for your good. What is meant to sift you out through Christ is actually a thing that sifts you in. God as man exercises His almighty power and gives His permission and reigns over the serpent. The serpent is overcome, as we read in Revelation, by the blood of the Lamb. Not some being out there, not some far away powerful One, but rather One who is right here. The One who speaks with Simon here, face to face. He intends your trial, but in such a way that it becomes an opportunity to experience His powerful mediation on your behalf. He's demanded it, but I pray for you. I, the God-man, pray. He permits it and has entered it so that in it you might know Him as One who is Almighty. powerful, and who also, as such, bows to pray for you." The Almighty, as man, intercedes. You see, it is powerful, it's intimate, it's close, and further, it is personal. Notice, Satan has demanded, you plural, but Jesus says, I have prayed for you, and now the plural becomes singular. He demands you all, and Jesus says, I've prayed for you, that your faith, singular, might not fail. Satan, when he prays, when he asks to devour you, he doesn't know your name and he doesn't care about your name. You're just one of a mass of humanity that he willingly desires to devour and destroy. He seeks to destroy. But God came that you might have life and that abundantly. Satan hungers for a faceless crowd, but Jesus, as we see here, prays for the individual. And not just an individual, but one whose name he knows. He says it, Simon. And he uses that name, his daddy's name, the one that his father and mother gave him when he was born. Simon, Simon, I pray for you. He assures him of it. I have done it. Now, of course, we can read that and interpret it as some sort of preference for Simon Peter above the rest. We may see some sort of recognition, as some commentators might, of papal privilege here. They're singling out one man to be the head of all the rest. But at the same time, and I think more rightly, we can discern in him a reality that is not for one man, but for one man as members of all, and all of us sharing it together. Not just his faith. but the faith of any and all like Him." That's what Jesus prays for. And I think this is the impulse of the rest of the disciples as you read the New Testament. You read the Apostle Paul, and he describes his conversion, and he says of it in 1 Peter 1, verse 16, that it is a pattern given for all, so that we can see in His salvation something of our own. And then John, throughout his gospel, never names himself, but always describes himself as the beloved disciple. So as you read, you might actually see yourself in his shoes and leaning against Jesus' breast as the one who, like him, shares in Jesus' love and intimacy and closeness, one who knows you and calls you by name. And then Simon Peter, of course, seems to understand grace, the grace that is His by the prayers of Christ, to be a gift that we all share. Just listen to his words from one of the letters of Peter. It says, Praise be to God, to the God and Father, now notice the inclusive language, of R, R, O U R, Lord Jesus Christ. In His great mercy, He has given us, new birth into an inheritance that can never perish spoil or fade kept in heaven for you plural though now for a little while you all may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials these have come so that the proven genuineness of your shared faith of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire, may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed." See, our trials, you see, they come from God in Christ, that we might experience His power upholding us, and so share in the inheritance that's not just Peter's, but Paul's, and John's, and every single human being that participates in the same faith that they have, and the love that Christ shows them. He prays for you. as He prayed for Peter, for you personally, as one among those whom He personally knows. He knows His sheep by name. And He calls out to you and cares for each one of you as intimately as that. And I think the passage teaches us that, so that you will know it most clearly in the same place that Peter does. It teaches us that, and that that is ours in the place of trial. While being sifted by Satan like wheat, there you will know such intimacy and a share in the faith. That is the faith that is once for all delivered to the saints. It's not the possession of Rome or one denomination or church, but the universal inheritance of all believers, fellowship with all those who continue with Jesus in his sufferings, a share in the experiential knowledge of the power and personal intimacy of God in Christ, the one who prays for us. But that's not all. That's just the first verse, really, of the text. It goes on from there. There's something else that we must be taught. We've seen God's power and love, and now, notice, lastly, our great need of it. Our great need. We are like Peter, yes, in our participation in this gracious gift of faith, but we are also like Peter in our folly and our presumption. We are like Peter, who is a fool so often. There is much, we might say, that needs to be sifted in us. I've heard it asked, rather, why doesn't God just go ahead and destroy the devil? It'd be a lot easier if He just would get rid of him. Why does He allow him to exist in the first place? And I think, in part, we can say, well, the answer is He has some work to do that is good for you. sift you so that you might be made more and more like Christ. Notice how self-assured Peter is. Jesus hints at him with his speech in the dialogue that he's going to go through something that will bring about repentance in him. He uses the language, he says, when you turn again. It's the language of repentance. So something's going to happen in your life, Peter, that's going to make you repent, which means you're going in a direction that needs to be turned away from to move in a new direction. And Peter, rather than being humbled by that word, responds like this. Peter said to him, Oh, Lord, Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death. He's told he's going to have to turn and Peter asserts himself. He believes and is confident of the direction that his faith is going to take him. And interestingly, he's exactly right, isn't he? In the book of Acts, do we not read that Peter goes to prison? Twice. Do we not know from tradition that Peter will die on account of his faith? Yes, we do. Prison and death will most certainly be his. Peter is right. His faith, you see, it is true. He understands what it means, but the directness of the path His assumption of the way that's going to happen, the purpose of it all, well, that's a bit off, isn't it? He's missing it in some way. The end of his faith will not be, as he assumes, a demonstration of his own confidence and strength, nor some display of his own boldness for Christ. No. The end of his faith will be a demonstration of the confidence and strength of another. Not him. His faith is about to bring Him, rather, into a full revelation of His weakness. And that is, or will be, true of each of us. Our faith will prove that it's not a weapon to be yielded or wielded by us, but rather something that is thrown into our lives by another like a lifesaver as we're drowning in the water. It's something that saves us, a power which upholds us. It is a gift that is given and wielded by someone else who is much stronger and much more steadfast than us in our lives. You see, our God-given gift will lead us in paths of righteousness, yes, but for His sake. We see it here. Jesus says, I tell you, Peter, the rooster will not crow this day until you deny three times that you even know Me. Peter will deny Him. Not once, three times. Faith as he knows it, faith as he understands it, will and is about to falter. Faith will bring him to the end of his doing in order to be established, strengthened, and settled by the doing of another than him. No longer a faith in His knowledge of Christ, it will be a faith in the Christ who knows Him. Faith in Jesus who knows our weakness, and knows our folly, knows our pride, knows our crazy self-confidence, and still prays for us. Still intercedes. I think we all begin this walk of faith with some measure of Peter's exuberant confidence here. We think we know the Lord. Forward and backward. We presume to know ourselves. Top to bottom. But that all falters the longer we stick close to Him and walk with Him. That all falls apart because, thank God, this life is not based on our own understanding, but His. It's not my knowing Him, but He knowing me that counts. My strength will be sifted out. My partial knowledge, it will fade away. And in the end, I will know Him as I am known by Him. fully, completely, as only he can. As he tells the Apostle Paul, his strength is not made perfect in our strength, but rather our weakness. It is a lesson each and every disciple must learn. Abraham knew it on that mountaintop with Isaac in his arms and the bleeding lamb on the fire. Joseph knew it when his brothers knelt before him, not in any way that he could have ever expected before, while he's a king in Egypt, and they're coming and groveling before him for bread that only he has. Moses knew it when he becomes ruler and judge in Israel, not in his youthful exuberance and strength, but rather when he is called by God's appointment, when he's an old man. And Job, too, knew it when he said, I heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now, now having gone through all that suffering, having been sifted, having been given into the hands of the one who sought his demise, now my eyes see you. Therefore, I despise myself and I repent in dust and ashes." Each was brought, you see, to the end of their faith, but not by a path of their own design. Another blazes the trail. He was and he is the author and the finisher of this faith. Infinitely strong, he became weak. He took on flesh. He humbled himself to death. He gave himself to be bruised by Satan. And we follow Him. It's the Father's will for each and every one of us, as it was for His Son. Satan will sift us. We will be sifted. But Jesus, praise the Lord, Jesus has prayed. Our faith will not fail, but be strengthened because He has prayed. And as we are strengthened by His strength, so we will know how to strengthen our brothers and sisters. So doing, or this being accomplished in us, we will be turned, turned on the right path to follow with Him. And there will be one thing, one thing which we will never be able to deny again, having denied it once. I know Him and have been with Him in weakness. It's no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me. And the life that I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we are humbled. the reminder of your goodness, oh Lord, your grace, your continual steadfastness in your commitment to us. Lord, we are thankful to know that we have such a great mediator, a high priest who does intercede for us and will be heard in heaven and will receive that which he asks so that all things will work together for our good and that we will be set upon the path of life by your almighty power and led as children by the hand into everlasting glory. Lord, we give you thanks for such steadfastness that we can hope in and hold on to, and we ask that we would do so even as we go forth from this place one day at a time. In Jesus' name, amen.