By: Nathan Steel
Read First: John 18.15–27; John 21.1–19; 1 Peter 5.6–11
Sometimes Jesus restores us by taking us uncomfortably close to the place where we failed.
On the night Jesus was arrested, Peter stood warming himself beside a charcoal fire. Three times he was confronted about his relationship with Jesus. Three times Peter denied him. His final denial ended as the rooster announced the coming morning.
After the resurrection, John gives us another scene.
The disciples have been fishing through the night when, “just after daybreak,” Jesus appears on the shore. And waiting for Peter is another charcoal fire.
That’s an unusually specific detail. The Greek word John uses for “charcoal fire,” anthrakia, appears only twice in the New Testament: beside the fire where Peter denied Jesus (John 18.18) and beside the fire Jesus prepared for him (John 21.9).
Then Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?”
The parallels are difficult to miss: early morning, a charcoal fire, and three emphatic statements.
It’s almost as though Jesus brings Peter back into the atmosphere of his failure, giving him an opportunity to respond differently.
But Jesus isn’t trying to shame Peter or make him suffer for what he did. Each time Peter affirms his love, Jesus responds by entrusting him with responsibility: “Feed my lambs… Tend my sheep… Feed my sheep.”
I don’t think this gives us a rule for how every person must be restored from every failure. But I do think Jesus gives us a method worth considering: Redemption doesn’t always mean leaving our failures safely in the past; sometimes healing may require returning to something painfully familiar and, with Jesus, learning to respond differently.
That’s uncomfortable when we’re the one who failed.
We may want forgiveness without revisiting what happened. We may want reconciliation without facing those we’ve hurt. We may want to demonstrate that we’ve changed somewhere safely removed from the circumstances in which we previously failed.
But sometimes redemption requires that we allow Jesus to bring us back to that visceral moment of failure.
Years later, Peter would tell other followers of Jesus to humble themselves, remain alert, resist the enemy, and trust “the God of all grace” who would “restore, support, strengthen, and establish” them (1 Peter 5.6–11).
We can’t know how much Peter was consciously remembering that morning beside the charcoal fire when he wrote those words. But Peter knew what restoration felt like. He had been humbled by his failure, confronted with his love for Jesus, entrusted with responsibility again, and strengthened to continue forward in his journey with him.
That is what living Scripture looks like for us: redemption doesn’t always allow us to leave the circumstances of our failures behind and passively assume it’s “under the blood”. Sometimes Jesus wants to bring us back to our most shameful moments — not to cause regret, but to give us a real moment to participate in our redemption — taking that visceral moment, giving it to him, and allowing him to have the final opinion of it.
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