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There is no more powerful depiction of God’s love for us than Jesus stepping off his throne to humble himself, take on flesh, and dwell among men.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . you are with me.” These words from Psalm 23 were some of the first I committed to memory as a new Christian. But they took on a transformative power after my mom died unexpectedly and tragically when she was 52. God used the pain of death to push words I’d known in my head down 18 inches into the wild country of my heart. I’d known Psalm 23 like an island on a map that I’d never visited. Her death was like being shipwrecked and vomited out of the storm onto that island. Death, for me, was familiar as charted but bigger and more intimidating in person. I’m not the first to encounter a gap between a theological truth I know in my head and the kind of knowledge that takes on flesh through personal experience. We see this gap highlighted at the moment of Peter’s restoration when he said, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you” (John 21:17). But though he knew Jesus’s love intellectually, Peter would come to know it more deeply, in ways that cut him, commissioned him, and ultimately kept him until death. Surgeon’s Searching Questions At an intellectual level, Peter’s theology in that moment was correct. Jesus, being God, knew everything. Peter also knew Jesus was full of grace (1:14). But there’s a difference between having head knowledge about Jesus’s grace and personally experiencing it. So Jesus three times asks whether or not Peter loves him (21:15–17)—the same number of times Peter had denied him (Luke 22:61). The Savior’s goal was to press the truth of his knowledge and love into the depths of Peter’s being and transform him. Master physician as he is, Jesus insists on cutting through layers of lesser symptoms to address the deepest cancers of our souls. Peter would’ve seen Jesus heal and forgive sinners dozens of times. He had an intellectual grasp of Jesus’s power, but he also knew his own brokenness. Master physician as he is, Jesus insists on cutting through layers of lesser symptoms to address the deepest cancers of our souls. Peter’s thrice denial wasn’t just shameful; it was embarrassing, especially when you consider that one of his questioners was a young servant girl (v. 56). Shame and self-doubt were sure to plague Peter after his denial, but these cancers wouldn’t go unaddressed by the Savior. Each reiteration of Jesus’s question cut Peter deeper. Cuts to Heal The questions hurt him (John 21:17), but cuts from Jesus’s deep and precise scalpel were necessary to remove Peter’s doubt, guilt, and embarrassment. Peter doesn’t hesitate to answer Jesus’s threefold questions about his love. He knows that Jesus knows he loves him. But by asking searching questions that exposed Peter’s shame and guilt, Jesus moved the apostle from mere head knowledge of his love and grace to personal knowledge. Jesus drives Peter to the end of his self-assurance and into a deeper assurance of Jesus’s grip on him. And a depth of grace Peter previously hadn’t known would transform his ability to lead others and help them drink from Christ’s depths as well. Wounded Healer’s Commissioning Until we’ve feasted deeply on Jesus’s grace, it’s impossible for us to feed others (2 Cor. 1:4). This was Jesus’s purpose in his relentless questions about Peter’s love. He peeled back Peter’s wounds layer by layer and then applied his healing medicine so he might release Peter to feed and take care of others. Hurt and grieved but cured, Peter was then well positioned to take that cure to others. Jesus doesn’t promise not to hurt us, but he hurts with the desire to make us healers. Restored, Peter wasn’t the same. His knowledge of Jesus’s grace had moved from propositional truth to personal experience. Yes, the Lord “[knows] everything” (John 21:17), but that knowledge includes tailor-made prescriptions to heal sin-sick souls like Peter, you, and me. “It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply,” A. W. Tozer once quipped. Jesus grieved Peter not for the pain’s sake—he’s no sadist—but for transformation’s sake. Peter had seen him go to the cross, die, and rise in triumph. Jesus was wounded so Peter could be healed. Now he wounds Peter so he can heal others. Love That Keeps Like Jacob before him (Gen. 32:25), Peter would always walk with a tender limp. After all, the apostle’s failure of nerve was documented and passed down through history. But grace is funny like that. It doesn’t deny or gloss over our failures; it shines brightest against them (Rom. 5:20). Jesus doesn’t promise not to hurt us, but he hurts with the desire to make us healers. If the early church was built and led by men like Peter, this should give us all hope today. Peter’s denial wasn’t the final word on his life. Neither was his love of Jesus. Instead, it was the love of the One who restored him that kept him and keeps the church to the end. Because of his own fickle will, Peter denied Jesus, but a day would come when he’d die the death of a martyr (John 21:18–19) and then hear those longed-for words, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matt. 25:23). Yet even in death, it wouldn’t be Peter’s failures, or his faithfulness, that kept him. No, what kept Peter was the truth of Jesus’s grace that over the course of the apostle’s life transformed from a mere intellectual statement to his lived reality.

“Dad, which one’s the bad guy?” My 8-year-old daughter was trying to make sense of the news story we were watching. A typical cops-and-robbers tale was unfolding on the screen, and she needed help sorting out which team to root for. I started to answer her but hesitated. What should I say? On the one hand, I knew what she was asking: Which person had broken the law? On the other hand, as a Christian, I knew the answer was more complex than simply “The bad guy is the one in the ski mask, pumpkin.” Perhaps this was a moment to take her deeper into how God sees goodness and badness. As a father of five, I’m increasingly concerned about my kids’ behavior. Not their bad behavior. Their good behavior. Don’t get me wrong; I’d much rather have obedient children than hellions. And thanks be to God, mine are (mostly) the former. But the longer I parent, the more I ask myself this question: What if my children’s biggest obstacle to faith isn’t their badness but their “goodness”? What if my children’s biggest obstacle to faith isn’t their badness but their ‘goodness’? My hunch is that if you’re a parent, you probably care that your children don’t grow up to be monsters. You’re likely raising them in an environment you believe will help them flourish into happy, obedient, hopefully Jesus-loving adults. In the process, you might already be enjoying some of the benefits of your parenting decisions: They are largely obedient. They aren’t spray-painting overpasses. If so, congratulations! However, we must be clear-eyed about the unique threat this poses: “Good kids” can easily miss their need for God’s grace. The Only People Jesus Came For In Luke 5, Jesus is at a house party thrown by his most recent convert, Levi the tax collector. As it was with tax collectors, the usual riffraff was also in attendance. Seeing this, the Pharisees asked Jesus why he was keeping company with such nasty folks. He stunned them with his answer: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (vv. 31–32). If I may paraphrase, Jesus just said, “I’ve only come for the bad guys.” This is good news. If you can see you’re a sinner, then you can have Jesus as Savior. But when there’s less visible “bad” to see, there’s new work to be done in our parenting—work that can help expose your child’s need for the Great Physician. I want to share three lessons my wife and I teach our kids to show them their need for Jesus. 1. Teach your kids the difference between ‘inside bad’ and ‘outside bad.’ We need to teach our children that sin doesn’t always look like we think. In our family, we use the terms “inside bad” and “outside bad” to explain this. “Outside bad” is the sin we can see: hurting people, cheating, lying, stealing . . . nightly news stuff. The apostle Paul tells us as much in his vice list in Galatians 5:20–21. Here’s a selection of behaviors Paul warns will keep us out of God’s kingdom: sorcery, fits of anger, drunkenness, orgies. All obvious, external, and public. But we often miss that in the same list, sprinkled among those outward sins, are all sorts of inward attitudes that are just as evil: idolatry, envy, jealousy. You can see sorcery. You can’t see jealousy. Jealousy happens in the heart. And it’s that invisible quality that makes this “inside bad” so dangerous. If we want our kids to run to the cross, we must first teach them that bad doesn’t always look bad. It may look like singing passionately in church while wanting people to be impressed with your voice. It may look like giving a friend a gift but only so you’ll get one back in return. This can play out a thousand ways, and it’s our job to give our children a category to see it. 2. Teach your kids to repent of their bad motives. If it’s true that good deeds done from a bad heart pose dangers just like bad deeds do, this should change the way we teach our kids to repent. Tim Keller helped me see this in technicolor when he once remarked, “Irreligious people repent of nothing. Religious people repent of their sins. But Christians repent of their righteousness.” Perhaps the most important thing we can do as parents is to expand our children’s view of repentance. We aren’t called to turn away just from our bad actions but also from the bad reasons we do our good actions. If they’re done to make much of ourselves instead of God, our “good” deeds can keep us from him. A great passage that has helped our kids see this is the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18:9–14. Read it with your children over a meal and ask them a set of simple questions about it: Who did more good things in the story, the Pharisee or the tax collector? Who went home justified? Why do you think God accepted the tax collector but not the pharisee? Did the Pharisee’s “goodness” help him or hurt him before God? As odd as it sounds, if your child’s “good” behavior is being done from a posture of selfishness, your child still needs to repent. Let’s teach our children this early. It’ll serve them well as they grow. 3. Teach your kids by confessing your ‘inside bad’ and ‘outside bad.’ As good as good instruction is, it’s much more powerful if it’s modeled. What an opportunity you have as a parent not simply to live uprightly before your children but to actively, regularly, and earnestly repent of your failings, especially your “inside” ones. If we want our kids to run to the cross, we must first teach them that ‘bad’ doesn’t always look bad. My wife is a gold medalist in this. Countless times, I’ve watched her confess her hidden sin to our kids, even when they were obviously much more at fault, simply because she had the wrong heart posture in her disciplining. Each time she does, she erodes our little ones’ narrative that God cares most about what they do on the outside. And each time, she gets a chance to show them how everyone needs the cross, even the mom who often looks like she has it all together. It’s true, Jesus only came to save bad guys. Let’s lovingly help our little ones discover that includes them. The sooner they see this, the more willing they’ll be to let the Great Physician do his work.

The study of Scripture’s grand narrative isn’t just an intellectual exercise; it’s a transformative one. In this roundtable discussion, Kendra Dahl sits down with biblical theology experts Benjamin L. Gladd, Courtney Doctor, and Elizabeth Woodson to discuss how a Christ-centered understanding of Scripture illuminates our study of theology and our lives as Christians. They discuss the following: How discovering biblical theology affected their lives How the storyline of Scripture underpins theological categories The importance of recognizing allusions to the Old Testament throughout the New Testament Recommended resources for further study of the Bible’s overarching narrative Mentioned on the Show: From Garden to Glory: How Understanding God’s Story Changes Yours by Courtney Doctor From Beginning to Forever: A Study of the Grand Narrative of Scripture by Elizabeth Woodson The Story Retold: A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament by G. K. Beale and Benjamin L. Gladd From Adam to Israel: A Biblical Theology of the People of God by Benjamin L. Gladd Dictionary of the New Testament Use of the Old Testament by G. K. Beale, Benjamin L. Gladd, Andrew David Naselli Even Better Than Eden: Nine Ways the Bible’s Story Changes Everything About Your Story by Nancy Guthrie Far as the Curse Is Found: The Covenant Story of Redemption by Michael D. Williams

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