Are There Degrees of Denial?

   In the Gospel reading for yesterday, one of Jesus' disciples acted to defend his Master with his sword and succeeded in cutting off the ear of one of the arresting party. Since Peter was usually the one disciple who acted impetuously, he is the assumed attacker, although the text does not identify the man.

   As I read further on in that same text, the reading for today, we see Peter in another light. In Luke 22 I read:

   "Then a servant girl, seeing him as he sat in the light and looking closely at him, said, “This man also was with him.” But he denied it, saying, “Woman, I do not know him.” And a little later someone else saw him and said, “You also are one of them.” But Peter said, “Man, I am not.”  And after an interval of about an hour still another insisted, saying, “Certainly this man also was with him, for he too is a Galilean.” But Peter said, “Man, I do not know what you are talking about.”

   Peter the denier, the one who earlier had spoken up to confess Jesus as the Christ, now gives an outright denial. The question is asked, the only answer needed was a simple yes or no, and Peter gives an emphatic "no". There is no doubt of the denial, it is absolute.

   Are there other ways of denial? Could some of my actions yesterday, even after I had felt so much that God had spoken to me, be classified in this way?

   I felt a conviction about some things in my life that were not right, or maybe not appropriate in light of what I had sensed was God's will in a matter. As I spoke to some others about these convictions, I was hesitant to say that "God told me". It seemed presumptuous to say for certain that I could hear these words, especially if others had not felt the same compunction about the subject. The prophets of old had proclaimed boldly "Thus saith the Lord", but who was I to give out that word?

   Was this a form of denial?

   Then there was the word from the Psalm 41 reading from yesterday:

   "Blessed is the one who considers the poor!
In the day of trouble the Lord delivers him;
the Lord protects him and keeps him alive;
he is called blessed in the land;
you do not give him up to the will of his enemies.
The Lord sustains him on his sickbed;
in his illness you restore him to full health."

   I concentrated my thoughts on the part about the poor, but was there more that I should have taken to heart? If there are promises that follow obedience to a certain precept that God puts forth in His Word, and if I fail to claim them, is that a form of denial? Do I pick and choose what part to emphasize and not follow through to the period at the end of sentence?

   So there appears to be denial in several forms. One is an outright "no". One may be an incomplete rendering of a situation, and another may be a sense of unbelief, or at least the denial to a possible connection in what has been proclaimed.

   Perhaps I am much more like Peter than I thought, at least in one of his bad moments.

   Help!