What if the problem isn't your failure - it's your memory of it?

There’s a moment in Matthew 16 that I keep coming back to.

Jesus has just asked his disciples the big question: Who do you say I am? Peter steps up. You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. And Jesus responds with something extraordinary. He gives Peter a name. A calling. The keys of the kingdom.

Here’s the thing that stops me every time: Jesus already knew. He knew that within weeks, this same man would sit around a courtyard fire and say three times, I don’t know him.

He handed Peter the keys anyway.

Not because Peter had a clean record. Not because he’d proved himself. He handed him the keys with full knowledge of what was coming - and he did it in advance.

I don’t know what you’re carrying today. Maybe it’s something big - a proper falling-away, a relationship broken, a decision you’d give anything to take back. Maybe it’s something smaller, but it still plays on repeat. And somewhere along the way, you picked up this quiet belief: people like me just don’t get trusted with important things.

The writer of Lamentations 3 wrote his mercies begin afresh each morning from the rubble of a fallen city. Not on a good day. In the wreckage.

That mercy is for you - not when you’ve sorted yourself out, but now. This morning. As you are.

You are not disqualified.

👉 Watch the full five-minute devotional here:

Read this week’s devotionals here - https://open.substack.com/pub/battledrilldevotional/p/you-already-have-the-key-seven-days?r=643q6o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true