Dejected, defeated, despised. At one time in your life, you may have felt this way. Perhaps you struck out on the baseball field. Skinny blondes called you fatty. No matter how hard you studied, you just couldn’t pass algebra.

Jesus never saw anyone as a lost cause. Jesus loved losers. The rag-tag riff-raff trailing behind Jesus would not appear on anyone’s “Who’s Who” list. Peter never ran a Fortune 500 company. He was a bumbling, strong-willed, blue-collar fisherman. But Jesus saw greatness in Peter. In Matthew 16:19, Jesus gave simple Peter the most important job in the world. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven: whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Wow. Heady stuff. A key was a badge of authority. Peter gave the keys Christ gave him to open the door to the Jews on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2), to the Samaritans after the preaching of Philip (Acts 8:14-17) and to the Gentiles after the Lord had sent him a vision and an appeal from Cornelius (Acts 10). Two of Peter’s New Testament letters still guide the Christian Church today. The Gospel of Mark was probably a compilation of Peter’s sermons about Christ. What a legacy from a “loser!”