The Smallest Resurrection
Even the Fish Believed
There is a story from the apocryphal Gospel of Peter that I have never been able to shake. The scene is set in Rome, in the open marketplace, where Peter is doing what Peter always did: talking about Jesus. The crowd is not impressed. They have heard the resurrection claim before, and they find it absurd. The grave is final and death is certain. Everyone knows this. Peter listens to their mockery and then makes an offer: “if I can show you the power of resurrection right here, right now, will you believe?”
They agree, half-amused, fully skeptical.
What Peter does next tells us everything about what it means to abide in Christ.
Peter does not close his eyes and wait for a word from heaven. He does not page through a mental catalogue of miracles looking for the right one. He looks around the marketplace and his eyes land on a fishmonger’s cart. And something in him saw a connection. It was the part of him that grew up on the water, the part that knows the weight of a net and the smell of a catch, the part of him that spent the better years of his life pulling mackerel out of the Sea of Galilee. Indeed, Peter’s inner fisherman saw what no one else could see; and what he saw was brilliant.
Peter walks to the fishmonger’s cart and picks up a smoked fish. In the full sight of the crowds gathered in that Roman town square, he lifts that mackerel toward heaven and asks the Father to demonstrate the power of the kingdom by resurrecting it, all in Jesus’ name.
And what came next surprised everyone, including Peter. The fully smoked fish comes back to life. It flops in his hands, whole and swimming. Peter places it in the town fountain. The crowds are amazed and the city receives the Gospel of Christ. Peter saw an entire Roman region converted to Christ in a matter of a few days.
Now here is what I want you to notice. God did not tell Peter to pick up that fish. Peter thought of it. It was a fisherman’s idea. This was the kind of idea that only comes to someone whose hands have held a thousand fish, whose life was built around the sea. And God smiled at Peter’s faith and ingenuity, and granted him whatever he asked, that the Father in heaven would be glorified (John 15:7).
This is what abiding actually looks like from the inside.
We sometimes imagine the Spirit-filled life as a kind of divine remote control: God inputs the commands, we execute them precisely, and the results follow. But that is not the picture Jesus paints in John 15. If you abide in Me and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. This is not an instruction manual. It is a description of union. The branch does not ask the vine what to do next. It simply draws life from the vine, and fruit comes, the branch’s own fruit, shaped by its own nature, growing in its own season.
Peter in that marketplace is not a passive vessel waiting to be filled. He is a son on his Father’s business, carrying the mission of Christ so deeply in his bones that when the moment arrives, he brings everything he is to everything God is doing. His history. His instincts. His fisherman’s mind. Abiding doesn’t erase who you are. It makes you more fully yourself, and then deploys that self in the service of the Kingdom.
God didn’t need a fisherman’s idea. He chose to smile at one.
This is the rhythm of the Inner Room made visible in the world. You go in alone, you sit with Christ, you let His mission become your mission and His heart become your heart. And then you go out, not with a script, but with a union. And that union expresses itself through your particular gifts, your particular history, your particular way of seeing the world.
Sometimes this looks small and quiet. The accountant who spots a financial solution no one else saw. The teacher whose words land at exactly the right moment for a student on the edge of giving up. The friend who calls at precisely the right time, not because they heard a voice telling them to call, but because something in them, something cultivated in the secret place, simply knew. These are not coincidences. These are the ordinary fruit of abiding, so common in the life of the Interior Christian that they stop feeling miraculous and start feeling like simply the way things work.
And then sometimes it looks like Peter at the fountain.
The shoe salesman whose customer cannot find a size that fits, and something shifts, something yields, and the shoe fits. The chef whose kitchen has run dry, who thinks, trusts, aligns with God, and the table is somehow full. The boy with five loaves and two fish standing in front of five thousand hungry people, handing what he has to Jesus, and watching the math stop making sense in the most wonderful possible way. Same principle. Different register. The Inner Room producing fruit at whatever scale the moment requires.
The question Jesus is asking in John 15 is not whether you are capable of miracles. The question is whether you are abiding closely enough that you would recognize the moment when it arrived. Peter recognized it because he had been living in union with Christ long enough that the mission of Christ was alive in him, not as a doctrine to defend but as a fire to carry. When the crowd mocked the resurrection, something in Peter rose up, not in anger, not in argument, but in creative, faith-filled response. He saw the need. He brought himself to it. He asked. And God, who delights in the ingenuity of His sons and daughters, said yes.
You have gifts that no one else has. A history that no one else carries. A way of seeing the world that is entirely your own. The Inner Room does not flatten those things. It consecrates them. It aligns them with the heart of God until the moment arrives, ordinary or extraordinary, quiet or city-converting, when everything you are becomes exactly what the Kingdom needs.
Abide. Think. Trust. Ask.
God is still smiling at fishermen’s ideas.
