When Strength Fails: Peter, Betrayal, and the Power of Dependence — John 13:18-38 (08.23.2026)

Would you remain standing for the reading of God's word, which comes today from

John 13, verses 18 through 38.

John 13:18–38

When I finish reading, I will say, this is the word of the Lord,

if you will respond by saying, thanks be to God.

Verse 13, 18, sorry, chapter 13, verse 18.

I'm not speaking of all of you. I know whom I have chosen, but the scripture will be fulfilled.

He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.

I am telling you this now before it takes place, that when it does take place,

you may believe that I am he.

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever receives the one I send receives me,

and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.

After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit and testified,

truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.

The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he spoke.

One of his disciples, whom Jesus loved, was reclining at table at Jesus' side,

so Simon Peter motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking.

So that disciple leaning back against Jesus said to him, Lord, who is it?

Jesus answered, It is he to whom I will give this morsel of bread when I have dipped it.

So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot.

Then after he had taken the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him,

what you are going to do, do quickly. Now in one verse.

No one at the table knew why he said this to him.

Some thought that because Judas had the money bag, Jesus was telling him,

buy what we need for the feast or that he should give something to the poor.

So after receiving the morsel of bread, he immediately went out and it was night.

When he had gone out, Jesus said, now is the son of man glorified and God is glorified in him.

If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and glorify him at once.

Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me.

And just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, where I'm going, you cannot come.

A new commandment I give you, that you love one another, just as I have loved

you, you also are to love one another.

By this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

Simon Peter said to him, Lord, where are you going? Jesus answered him,

where I'm going, you cannot follow me, but you will follow afterward.

Peter said to him, Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.

Jesus answered, will you lay down your life for me?

Truly, truly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow till you have denied me

three times. This is the word of the Lord.

Good morning. Glad to see you all this morning. Go ahead and be turned in your

Bible to John chapter 13.

John 13 · chapter mention

If you have a Bible with you, and if you don't, you can follow along in the

bulletin. There should have been an insert with the scripture in it,

and we'll have it on the screen as well.

As you're finding your way to John chapter 13, I'll go ahead and pray for us one more time.

John 13 · chapter mention

Father, we thank you so much for your word and for all that we have to learn through this passage.

I pray that you would help us right now, that you would send your spirit into

this room, into our hearts, to open up our hearts, to be able to comprehend

your word and to receive from you what we need to learn from this.

I pray you'd be in my mouth and help me to speak what is true and only what

is true. In Jesus' name, amen.

So we are a good ways into the gospel of John.

So we're on chapter 13, and we are in what's called the upper room discourse.

And that means that at this point, we've gone through the first 12 chapters,

which were largely about showing us these signs of Jesus, these miracles that

he performed very, very publicly that pointed beyond just the power in themselves to

the truth that he is the son of God, the Messiah.

And so we've made our way through seven signs, seven miracles.

Now we've transitioned and Jesus is no longer doing public miracles.

This is kind of the lead up to his crucifixion.

And so we're in the upper room discourse that covers roughly five hours of time

that Jesus spends with his disciples, partaking of the Passover, instituting

communion and teaching them, teaching them a whole lot before he is arrested,

before he's betrayed, arrested

and crucified and then risen.

And so all of what he says in this upper room discourse, his disciples are listening intently, right?

This is, if something very, very significant happens in your life.

It concretizes all of the memories around that.

It makes everything around that event burned into your memory.

And it's the same for the disciples.

They're about to go through the hardest night of their life.

And so Jesus is pouring out some of his most important teaching to them as he

knows that this is about to happen.

In this passage, he has just washed the disciples' feet. We talked about that last week.

And we've seen multiple times just recently in the anointing of Jesus back in

chapter 12 and in the washing of disciples' feet, we've seen that Judas is this betrayer.

And we've talked about Judas a good bit. I'm not going to go as much into Judas today because of that.

Today, we're really going to focus the majority of this sermon on Peter.

Because Peter, we haven't talked about as much what he is going to go through

on this most memorable, most dark night of his soul.

And Jesus predicts that Judas is going to betray him. He knows exactly what's

happening. He is in control. That's one of the things that you see in this passage.

Jesus is 100% in control.

He is marching to the cross of his own volition.

He's never for one moment out of control.

And so he tells Judas even in this passage, what you're going to do,

go do quickly. He is Lord over even his own death.

Peter is going to get some information at the end of this passage that he's

going to betray the Lord, that he's going to deny him three times this very night.

He is about to fail miserably.

He's about to go into the greatest test of his life, and he's not ready.

Maybe you have failed the Lord recently.

Maybe you feel that. Maybe this week, in some way, you feel that you have sinned,

you have failed the Lord, you've dropped the ball on something very,

very important, or maybe recently, maybe even this weekend.

But what we can learn from Peter is going to be very, very helpful for all of us.

Maybe you're in a season of testing, or perhaps you're going to go through a

season of testing very soon.

Do you know what you need? Do you know what you need to be ready for that season of testing?

Do you know what you need to be able to weather that?

Because scripture has answers for us. And Peter is going to teach us some very, very valuable wisdom.

All of us, all Christians are like Peter.

Until we've been brought to the end of ourselves, we have far too much confidence,

in what we can accomplish.

When we think about facing difficult trials or tests, we imagine that we're

going to need to dig deep and we're going to need to gather up strength from

within ourselves. And we're going to have to gather up our resolve.

And we imagine that when push comes to shove, we'll be able to weather the storm.

But that's a very dangerous way to face tests and trials.

Just as Peter had to learn, we must learn that we are unbelievably weak in our own strength.

Here's the main idea for my sermon. I'm not going to leave you in the dark.

The answer to our weakness isn't greater resolve, but greater dependence on Christ.

Point number one, if you are a note taker is that you don't know yourself as well as you think you do.

In verses 18 through 30, a lot happens in that.

We see that Jesus knows that Judas is about to betray him exactly how that's

going to happen, exactly when it's going to happen.

And he knows his disciples' hearts. He's not surprised by the ways that they're

going to let him down this very night.

He's not surprised by their weakness. And yet in the midst of all of his knowledge

and certainty, we see how confused the disciples are And especially when you

kind of pull in some of the other gospel accounts of this conversation.

You can see it very, very clearly.

In Mark's gospel, it says that when Jesus says, one of you is going to betray

me, they began to be sorrowful and to say to one another, or one after another, is it I?

Is it I? So they're confused. They don't know who's he talking about.

And it's a powerful lesson for us that we do not know ourselves nearly as well as we think we do.

Peter clearly shows us that he thought much more highly of himself than he should have.

When he says, Lord, I will die for you. I'll die for you.

He thinks he knows himself. He thinks he knows what he's capable of.

And he thinks he would never turn his back on Jesus.

We are all a lot like Peter.

But the Lord says, actually, Peter, you're going to deny me three times tonight.

Jeremiah 17, 9 through 10 says, The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.

Who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the heart and test the mind.

The point is that our hearts are prone to deceive us. And you know,

the problem with being deceived is that We don't know that we're deceived.

We're oblivious to it. Right now, if I could go around the room and ask each

one of you one by one, are you deceived about anything in your life?

If you were to honestly answer that, I mean, maybe you know the right way to

answer that, but if you were to honestly answer it, you'd probably say, I don't think so.

And yet, every single one of us, we have blind spots.

Every single one of us, there are areas of our lives that we are not seeing correctly.

And that's the problem with being deceived. No one who is deceived knows it.

Otherwise, they wouldn't be deceived anymore.

So one of the ways that we're so much like Peter is we have this uncanny tendency

to think that we know more than we do, that we are,

spiritually more healthy than we are, that we have greater strength to stand than we really do.

That was certainly the case for the church in Laodicea. If you've ever read

the letters to the churches in Revelation, the church in Laodicea,

Jesus says this to them in Revelation 3.17,

for you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,

not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

In other words, your own self-assessment can be radically different from reality.

And this is problematic And this is why, friends, we need the church We need

one another, we need relationships And we need the word of God.

The scriptures serve to teach us who God is, and the scriptures serve to show

us who we are. Did you know that?

James 1, 22 through 25 says that the scriptures act like a mirror to show us who we are.

When we read the word, we see more about ourselves. We're supposed to see ourselves

more clearly. Hebrews 4.12 says that the word of God can discern the thoughts

and intentions of our hearts.

So while we might be easily deceived, our hearts might easily be deceived and

deceive us, the word of God serves to show us ourselves.

I hope you read the Bible that way, not just to pick up more information,

not just to add some more things to the list of stuff that you know, but to see yourself.

I hope you open it up and you say, God, show me what needs to change in my life.

Show me what I need to put into action. If your Bible reading doesn't result in actual

changes being made in the way that you're thinking and the way that you're living

and the way that you're relating to other people and to God,

then you're not reading the Bible with the help of the Holy Spirit.

And James says that the more you read the Bible without putting it into action,

the more that you deceive yourself.

That's one reason the Word might not be producing fruit in your life,

is that you're not reading it as a mirror.

Another reason, maybe you don't know the Lord yet, and you need to be born again.

You need the Spirit of God to come into your heart and make you alive together

with Christ so that when you read the Word of God, you have His help and you

can understand what He's saying to you.

The good news is that either way, whether we have never come to know him or

whether we have drifted away and we're not reading the Bible with the help of

the Spirit, what's called for is the same.

We need to repent. We need to return back to him. And the Bible is so very clear

that there's always, always grace and mercy available to those that repent and return to him.

He never turns away anyone who comes back to him in genuine repentance.

So that's the first thing.

We are deceived. We don't know ourselves as well as we think we do.

Secondly, we see in this passage that we cannot do for Jesus what Jesus must do for us.

Notice what Jesus says at the end of verse 33. He says, where I'm going, you cannot come.

If you were with us last week, we saw when Jesus was going around washing the,

disciples' feet, he gets to Peter and Peter says, Lord, you're not gonna wash me.

And Jesus says, no, if I don't wash you, Peter, you'll have no share with me.

Peter still needs his theology corrected. At this point in Peter's life,

he thinks Christianity is primarily about serving Jesus.

Maybe that's how you think too. Maybe when you think, what is Christianity?

You think it's about serving Jesus.

But Christianity isn't primarily about serving Jesus. It is about Jesus serving us.

Mark 10, 45 tells us that Christ came not to be served, but to serve.

If you think that the main message of Christianity is we need to be good people,

we need to be better people, and we need to serve God, you aren't believing the gospel.

That's not good news at all.

The gospel is good news because the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve.

The good news of the gospel is that he says, where I am going, you cannot come.

I am going to do something for you that you cannot do for yourself.

That's the gospel.

He came to cleanse us of the filth of our sins, and we cannot cleanse ourselves.

He came to be our substitute, to atone for our sins, and we cannot atone for our own sins.

No one else could have died for your sins or for mine.

And so he came not to be served, but to serve. And I want you to see that that

goes beyond his accomplishing our redemption through his death and resurrection.

Resurrection, Jesus rose from the grave and he ascended into heaven.

And sometimes we forget that part of the gospel.

What is Jesus doing now? He has ascended into heaven. He sits at the right hand

of God, the father. And now what is he doing?

He's interceding on our behalf.

He is enabling us. He's empowering us. He sends his spirit to the church.

This is where this new command in verses 34 and 35 becomes so important.

Immediately after he says, where I'm going, you cannot come.

I'm doing something for you that you cannot do for yourself.

He gives the command, love one another. Just as I have loved you,

you also are to love one another. Notice the command to love is not, that's not the new part.

That's been throughout the scriptures. What's new is that he's saying,

not love as you define it, but love as I define it.

Love one another as I am modeling for you, as I'm showing you,

laying my life down for you.

And then he says, this is going to

be the greatest witness that you are my disciples to the watching world.

Your love for one another. That's gonna be the distinguishing mark when the

world looks to the church.

Your distinguishing mark is that you love one another.

That is, what's important here is the timing, the order.

Where I am going, you cannot come. Immediately after that, he says a new commandment I give to you.

1 John 4, 19 says, we love because he first loved us.

The order matters very much, believer.

The order matters very much. We don't go and love people to prove ourselves,

or to earn God's favor. We love because he first loved us.

He is enabling us to do what is impossible, to love as he himself loved us.

This is only possible because,

For those who have first received his love, the world cannot manufacture this

kind of love. We cannot manufacture this kind of love.

This is only possible when the risen and ascended Christ sends his spirit to

his church and enables and empowers a supernatural kind of love.

This isn't shallow. This isn't superficial.

Jesus commands us to do something impossible apart from his enabling power.

Listen to what John Piper says regarding this idea. He says,

when you become a Christian, a disciple of Jesus, you do not become his helper.

He becomes your helper.

You do not become his benefactor. He becomes your benefactor.

You do not become his servant. He becomes your servant. Jesus does not need your help.

He commands your obedience and offers his help.

Christ becomes our servant. And when he does, all of his other radical commands

are no longer things we do for him, but things he enables us to do for others.

The Christian life is a life of serving others in the strength that he supplies as our servant.

Now, you might be thinking that the Bible says that we are servants. And we are. We are.

And I'm not suggesting that it doesn't say that, and John Piper's not suggesting

that either, if you read or listen to his sermon on this.

What, I mean, what John Piper is saying in this quote, what I'm trying to communicate

is that we're not completing some work for God that he cannot do apart from our help.

He is sovereign. He is God.

Doesn't need us, but he chooses to include us in what he's doing.

Acts 17, 24 through 25 is helpful.

It says, the God who made the world and everything in it being Lord of heaven

and earth does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands

as though he needed anything since he himself gives

to all mankind, life and breath and everything.

Friends, we wouldn't keep breathing.

We wouldn't be able to take another breath if he didn't enable it.

Much less would we be able to carry out any good work that he commands us to do.

God doesn't need us. We need him.

We don't serve God so much as he serves us. And that is a humbling thing.

We really are that weak. We really are that needy. And the more deeply we feel

that truth, the better off we will be.

As long as we have the mindset of Peter, which is, Lord, you'll never wash my

feet or Lord, wherever you go, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna die for you.

As long as we have that mindset, we're not seeing ourselves correctly.

Peter's not seeing himself correctly, not yet.

And Jesus is going to say to him in verse 38, will you lay down your life for

me? He's got it backwards, doesn't he?

Truly, truly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow till you've denied me three times.

Peter thought, I need to lay my life down for him. And he did not understand the gospel yet.

Christ had to do for Peter what only Christ could do for him.

He has to do for you and for me what only he can do for us.

We cannot do anything apart from him empowering us.

So Peter hears Jesus say, love one another as I've loved you.

And his instinct is still, I'll show you how much I love you. I'll die for you, right?

And Jesus is going to show him how desperately he needs to rely on him for everything.

That brings us to point number three.

We are most vulnerable when we place our confidence in ourselves.

Now, here's just a little important aside, not an aside, but how do you know

if you're putting your confidence in yourself?

You're either, if you're putting your confidence in yourself,

you're either going to be prone to one of two errors. Either you're going to

be like Peter, overconfident.

I can do it. I don't need his help.

Or you're going to be given over to paralyzing fear and despair.

Some of you are in here and you're thinking, well, I'm not anything like Peter.

I don't have confidence to do anything.

But that's actually another form of self-confidence. That's another symptom of self-confidence.

When you feel that way, I have no confidence to do anything at all,

that should be a little flag saying, who am I putting my confidence in then?

I'm putting my confidence in myself. And so depending on maybe what you've experienced

in your past or even just your

disposition, your natural disposition, you may fall into very overconfident

like Peter or very under confident like Gideon. You know the story of Gideon?

The Lord finds Gideon and he's hiding in a wine press, afraid to do anything.

His family is completely lost, worshiping idols, and he won't even have a conversation with them.

The Lord comes to him and he begins the work of shifting his identity,

of changing where he puts his confidence.

And Gideon learns to trust the Lord, to put his confidence in the Lord.

But we are prone to be Peter or Gideon, and both are misplaced confidence.

Both are putting our confidence in ourself. One leads to self-reliance and presumption.

The other leads to timidity and inaction.

The person who stopped placing their confidence in self and started putting

their confidence in Christ is very bold and very prone to action.

Peter, however, in this moment, he's on the side of the spectrum of, I've got this.

I can do this. I will lay down my life for you.

In fact, in Matthew 26, we learn that Peter says, though they all fall away, I will never fall away.

Peter thinks, I am the most committed disciple you've got.

He thinks he loves Jesus more than anybody. He thinks he's the most committed

to the mission, another symptom of self-confidence.

These are the words of someone who hasn't been humbled yet, but he's about to be.

This is the words of somebody who doesn't yet know their weakness, but he's about to learn.

A garden in just a couple of hours. The Lord's going to go to the garden of Gethsemane to pray.

And he's going to bring his best friends, his closest friends,

Peter, James, and John with him up to the garden and ask them to be in prayer as well.

And in the last minutes before Jesus faces his greatest trial, what's he doing?

He is praying. He's praying. He's pouring out his soul to the Father in prayer.

In the life of Jesus, we see what the opposite of self-reliance looks like.

It looks like desperate prayer.

And Jesus knows that his friends are about to face their greatest trial as well.

And what does he tell them to do? He tells them, watch and pray that you not enter into temptation.

Watch and pray.

And if you know the story, Mark tells us that three times Jesus comes back to

the disciples and three times, not only are they not praying, they're asleep.

They're sleeping. Peter couldn't pray because he didn't really think he needed it.

He wasn't desperate Not yet anyway.

Ever been through a test that makes you desperate, you know nobody has to convince you to pray.

You can't do anything but pray in those moments. Why? Because you've come to the end of yourself.

You've realized if God doesn't do something, I'm sunk.

But here's the reality, believer. we're always that weak.

Regardless of the day and the way that we happen to feel, we always need him that badly.

We're always actually in desperate need of his power, of his help.

But when we come to the end of ourselves, we cry out to him in anguish.

We confess our sins. We plead with God. We beg him to move.

And we just don't realize how needy we are until the bottom falls out.

Listen to what John Calvin says commenting on Peter's prayerlessness this night in Gethsemane.

He says, the manner of resistance, which is here enjoined, resistance to the

temptation that he's about to go into,

is not to draw courage from reliance on our own strength and perseverance,

but on the contrary, from a conviction of our weakness to ask arms and strength from the Lord.

Our watching, therefore, will be of no avail without prayer.

Peter's confident declaration, I will lay down my life for you,

and his failure to pray in just a couple of hours are two sides of the same coin.

It's the same issue. In spite of Jesus' warning, Jesus lets him know what's

coming, and still Peter's confident that he's ready to face this trial.

And therefore doesn't see his desperate need to pray for help.

And Jesus tells him, and he's about to find out, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Let's bring this to a conclusion here.

Most of us, we've seen Judas and the way that he's very intentionally plotting

and planning to betray the Lord. Now we're seeing Peter, who is not at all plotting and planning.

He's going to fall flat on his face.

Most of us in this room are a lot more like Peter than Judas.

We genuinely love him. We sincerely intend to obey him.

The moment of testing hits, we come to find out how truly weak we are.

And still the Lord is working in us, just as the Lord was working powerfully

in the life of his disciple.

Jesus is doing for Peter what Peter can't do for himself. He's showing him his

weakness. He's humbling him.

And Jesus tells Peter in verse 36, where I'm going, you cannot follow now,

but you will follow afterward, Peter wasn't ready to lay down his life for Christ, not this night.

He fails the Lord again and again and again. And yet, Jesus knew the man that

Peter was going to become with time.

And he tells him, eventually you will follow me in death. And church history

tells us that many years later, Peter did. He laid down his life for his Lord.

He learned to love the way that Christ loves us.

He learned to depend on Christ rather than his own resolve, rather than his own strength.

And he grew into a mature man of God.

He didn't get there apart from that great teacher failure.

If it weren't for his painful failure, Peter could have never become the man,

and the leader of the church that he became.

Jesus uses his past sin to humble him, to prepare him for his future ministry,

and he is still doing that today.

The Lord still uses our most painful failures. He shows us how weak we are and

how much we desperately need him.

Because when we are weak and when we know it, when we go to the Lord for the

help we desperately need, only then are we truly strong through his power in us.

Let's pray. Lord.

You for giving us a Bible full of truth, full of reality, full of people who are like us.

Lord, thank you that you didn't leave these parts out, that we can learn from,

the mistakes and failures and sins and self-confidence of Peter.

Lord, help us as we go from here today and this week to remember,

that we desperately need you and help us to call out to you for help and to

trust that you will give it. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.