Busted!
GALATIANS 2: 1-16
(September 15)
My former mother-in-law is such a little cutie. She is all of 5 feet (maybe an inch or so more). As she has aged, she has developed such a funny disposition. She has this little thing she does when she makes a mistake. She just shakes her head and says "OOPSIE!"
It is funny, so funny that we are all doing it. I can't tell you how many times I have messed up at something and said, "OOPSIE!" When I mess up, it is usually not on purpose, but simply a mistake.
But Paul catches Peter in an "OOPSIE" that doesn't appear to be a mistake.
Paul speaks of a time when he, Barnabas and Titus returned to Jerusalem, as they had been prompted to go by God. Paul met privately with the leaders of the church and shared with them the message he had been preaching to the Gentiles, just to make sure they were in agreement, and he wasn't wasting his time.
They supported his message and had nothing more to add to what he was already doing. They realized the responsibility God had given to Paul to preach to the Gentiles. James, Peter and John also saw him as a co-worker, and encouraged the continued work of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles.
Peter went to Antioch, and that is where Paul called him out on his "OOPSIE." When Peter first arrived, he had no problem eating with the Gentiles, even though they were not circumcised. Later, some friends of James came along, and Peter changed his position. He would no longer eat with the Gentiles. He didn't want to be criticized by these people.
This caused the other Jewish believers to follow his lead. Even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. Paul confronted Peter in front of all of them.
"Since you, a Jew by birth, have discarded the Jewish laws and are living like a Gentile, why are you now trying to make these Gentiles follow the Jewish traditions?"
He goes on to say, "You and I are Jews by birth, not 'sinners' like the Gentiles. Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. And we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law."
Even though Peter was a leader of the church, Paul felt that he was acting like a hypocrite. While Peter knew better, he was driven by fear of what James and the others would think.
Does this sound familiar? How often are our own actions based on the fear of what someone might think? We know what is right and true, yet we bend that a little, or ignore it all together, for the sake of what others think.
That is one of the reasons Christian accountability is so important in our lives. We need to surround ourselves with people of the faith who are not afraid to call us out whenever we have a moment of "OOPSIE!"