The following are some comments on Lesson 8, From Folly to Faith: The Apostle Peter.
Peter being one of the most prominent characters of the gospels, there are many places that this discussion could be taken. I'd like to focus on the role of intuition in God's followers.
Intuitive reasoning, I think, is frequently thought of as having less value than concrete reasoning - reasoning based upon what can be seen, observed, measured, and recorded. Decisions made based on intuition, I think, are often considered suspect. If it turns out okay, the result is often attributed to blind luck. According to the Myers-Briggs type indicators, perhaps a quarter of the U.S. population tends to the intuitive style of gathering information (http://www.infj.org/archive/typestats.html). Would God have created people this way if it didn't have value?
Peter, to me, looks like a person who made his decisions primarily based on intuition. Whether it was the decision to make a full-time commitment to follow Jesus, the request to walk on water, identifying Jesus as the Son of God, the action of fighting back with a sword -- if the decisions were made in light of what could be observed, measured, and evaluated, they wouldn't have made sense. But to Peter, there was something bigger than what could be immediately observed. He didn't fully realize the bigness of Jesus, but in the light of Jesus' bigness, Peter's decisions and actions made sense.
The problem is that Peter's intuition was skewed by his own misunderstandings about the Messiah and his own desires about what the kingdom of heaven might mean to him. Peter might have based some of his initial decision to follow Jesus on the material rewards he thought would be at the end. Peter intuited that if Jesus could walk on water, Jesus could allow him to do so, too. Immediately after declaring Jesus to be the Son of God, Peter tries to dissuade Jesus from a negative-sounding path. Jesus' future didn't fit in with Peter's intuitive sense. Finally, in Gethsemane, Peter intuited that a climactic battle was about to occur. The problem again is that his assumptions skewed his intuition and he thought that the battle was physical when it turned out to be spiritual in nature.
On the other hand, in Acts, we see the same intuitive Peter, but now his intuition is spot on. He intuits an opening for the gospel message, so he preaches. He intuits faith in the crippled beggar and so calls him to healing. Peter intuits something amiss with Ananias and Sapphira and exposes their deceit.
The difference between the two Peters, before and after Jesus' death and resurrection, I think is one of focus. Formerly Peter was most concerned about what he could get out of Jesus. Afterwards, Peter's concern and focus was how to be a conduit for God's message of hope and salvation. Peter's story seems to provide some evidence that one of the ways the Holy Spirit communicates to us is through intuition. Could it be that when a person's focus is on self, the Holy Spirit cannot use intuition (or that messages are garbled and corrupted)? But when the focus is on God, intuition becomes a powerful means through which God is able to communicate things that cannot be directly seen or observed?
As missionaries, as agents bearing hope from and of the unseen world, perhaps we should be more open to intuition in how we interpret what we see, observe, make decisions, and engage the world and its people around us.
For more on this topic, the Summer 2008 issue of Leadership contains an article by Gordon MacDonald, "I Have This Feeling..."
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