True Security Is Found In Humility

I Peter 5:5-7

Transcript

One Peter five, six to fourteen. Humble
yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time
he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you. Be
sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, roars around like a
roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing
that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood
throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all
grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore,
confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To him be dominion forever and ever.
Amen. Final greetings by Sylvanus, a faithful brother as I regard him. I have
written briefly to you exhorting and declaring that this is the true grace of
God. Stand firm in it. She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you
greetings, and so does Mark, my son. Greet one another with the kiss of love.
Peace to all of you who are in Christ. These are the words of our God. There are
probably a lot of things in your life that you could think of that you don't
want to happen to you. Things that you would like to avoid if at all possible.
Some of our lists might look the same. There might be some overlap. Some of you
might have your own unique things, but you might say, I'd like to not get
cancer. I'd like to not get Parkinson's. I'd like to not get Alzheimer's. I'd
like to not go bankrupt. I'd like to not be eaten by a shark. And some of those
things, to varying degrees, they're not entirely under your control. But to the
extent that I can do anything about it, I'd like to prevent it. If one of you
organizes a church bungee jumping trip, you can go ahead and do that. I won't be
coming. And you probably have your own list of things, your own ideas of things
that come to mind, and that's valid as far as it goes, the things that you'd
like to avoid. But as we look at this text this morning, we ought to put
something else above those things. Try as you and I might, there are some things
that are not under our control. But when we read this passage in First Peter
this morning, we ought to think, I'd like to not go through life being opposed
by God. Look again at First Peter, Chapter five. And verse five tells us, What
could be worse than that, being opposed by God? What kind of way would that be
to go through life being opposed by God? God opposes the proud. And if we put
our big idea more positively, we could say it like this, True security is found
in humility. True security is found in humility. That's what I'd like to explain
to you and convince you of this morning. So we're coming to the end of our
sermon series through the New Testament letter of First Peter. We're going to
camp out in these three verses in verses five through seven as Peter writes and
encourages and challenges these believers. So John read a larger portion of
Chapter five. But let me repeat the passage that we're going to focus on.
Likewise, you who are younger be subject to the elders, clothe yourselves, all
of you with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud, but gives
grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God,
so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him
because he cares for you. In the earlier chapters of earlier verses of Chapter
five, Peter has been exhorting the elders as to how they are to shepherd the
flock. Then he zooms out to the whole church and says they are all to relate to
each other with humility, mutual humility, to put on humility like a robe or
like a cloak, like a garment. We are to be enveloped in humility in our
interactions with one another. And verse five says God opposes the proud, but
gives grace to the humble. That phrase is from the Old Testament Book of
Proverbs, where the wise father is encouraging his sons to pursue humility. And
in Proverbs three thirty four, someone like Solomon says toward the scorners, he
that's God is scornful, but to the humble he gives favor. And this idea that God
pours out grace on the humble gets picked up by James and by Peter. God opposes
the proud. He hinders them. If you look back in the letter, First Peter Chapter
three, we hear a similar idea in reference to marriage. First Peter three seven
says, likewise, husbands dwell with your wives in an understanding way, showing
honor to the woman as the weaker vessel. Since they are heirs with you of the
grace of life so that your prayers may not be hindered. What could be worse than
having your prayers hindered or blocked or turned aside by God? And that idea of
being opposed by God comes up again in First Peter five when it says God opposes
the proud. And that phrase God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble
is in the present tense. So the idea is almost like God is continually and
always opposing the proud and God is continually and always pouring out grace on
the humble. So what's pride? How bad is it? What is it? We have a lot of other
words for this. We say someone is arrogant or conceited or stuck up or vain, and
it's very easy for us to recognize this in other people. That's one of those
things we know it when we see it. Pride is taking the credit or the honor or the
glory where it's due to God. When it's really due to God. This is what this is
what C.S. Lewis says about pride in his famous book, Mere Christianity. What I'm
going to read is a small selection from his chapter on pride. C.S. Lewis said
about 80 years ago. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free.
Which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else. And of
which hardly any people except Christians ever imagined that they are guilty
themselves. There is no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And
the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice that I
am talking of is pride or self-conceit. Pride leads to every other vice. It is
the complete anti-God state of mind. In God, Lewis says, you come up against
something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless
you know God as that and therefore know yourself as nothing in comparison, you
do not know God at all. As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud
man is always looking down on things and people. And of course as long as you
are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. So knowing the
danger of pride, knowing that God continually opposes the proud, Peter presents
a very simple positive alternative to the church. He says, humble yourselves
therefore. Humble yourselves therefore. Humble yourselves. Now we have all had
experiences that are humiliating that we were not seeking out. Sometimes you
interact with, you go somewhere, you have a long conversation with someone, and
then you see yourself in the mirror later and realize there is a piece of
broccoli sticking between your front teeth the entire time. Sometimes you have
to, you go somewhere, you speak in public, your tongue was tied, you freeze, you
are embarrassed. Those are things that are humiliating and then you remember
them very clearly for the rest of your life. But what Peter is talking about
here is a little different. He is talking about a proactive humbling, not an
accidental circumstance, but a proactive humbling. You can actually pursue
humility on purpose. And humility is not just being likable or winsome or self-
effacing, just giving other people the credit. Those are attractive qualities,
but they are more a byproduct of true humility rather than humility itself.
Humility itself is complete faith in God, not myself. We read Luke 18 at the
beginning of the worship service where Jesus contrasted the tax collector with
the Pharisee. The Pharisee was self-satisfied in who he was and in his
credentials, and he saw himself as superior to other men. But the tax collector
in Luke 18, standing far off, would not even lift his eyes to heaven, but beat
his chest saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. And Jesus said, I tell you,
this man went down to his house justified rather than the other, for everyone
who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be
exalted. Humility recognizes that God is God, and my standing before him is
completely dependent on his grace. And then flowing out of that, humility is an
attitude that puts others first, ahead of myself, and recognizes that their
needs, their desires, their ideas are worthy of my attention. Now we're all
self-focused by nature, so that is not an attitude that comes naturally. It
really only happens when we truly believe the gospel of justification by faith.
The gospel crushes our pride because it eliminates any sense of merit or
standing that I have before God. And I believe that my standing before God is
completely dependent on his unmerited favor poured out on me. So we're to
actually pursue humility. Verse six says, humble yourselves therefore under the
mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time he may exalt you. So the church
has been told to clothe themselves in humility. Now this is starting to explain
how that is actually done, how to do that. Remember, the letter is written to
believers who are suffering. Suffering in almost every form is a blow to our
pride, because it's a reminder we're not invincible. We're not as strong as we
think. Suffering damages our pride. It's one of the ways that God uses it. When
you get sick, it's humbling because you realize your body doesn't work perfectly
and you're not going to live forever. When you get mistreated, it's humbling
because people are failing to realize how naturally likable you are. When you
get passed over, it's damaging to your pride because people obviously have
looked past how gifted you are. These people were suffering for being
Christians. They were marginalized and rejected and spoken poorly of and felt
like they were on the edge of society. They were despised for their faith. And
Peter tells them to humble themselves under the mighty hand of God. That phrase,
the mighty hand of God, is actually meant to call to mind the exodus. So if you
think about that, the Israelites were also in very humiliating circumstances.
They were enslaved to the mightiest nation on earth. They're spending their days
working for Pharaoh, accomplishing nothing for themselves, but working for
Pharaoh. They were helpless. Enslaved people. All they could do is keep working
and groan and cry out to God. And Exodus 2 tells us God heard the cries of his
people and he remembered his covenant with them. The people groaned, they cried
out to him about their enslavement and God heard. And then when God speaks to
Moses in chapter 3, when God calls Moses, he says, I know that the king of Egypt
will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. Later on, after the
exodus, after all those miraculous events, Moses speaks to the people of Israel
and tells them to remember what God has done. And he says to them in
Deuteronomy, you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and
the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an
outstretched arm. So taking all that together, to humble yourself under God's
mighty hand is to accept that he is God and that all power belongs to him. It's
to entrust yourself to him. It's to recognize that he's sovereign and wise. It's
a posture of the heart that bows down to him and says, like the old hymn says,
whatever my God ordains is right. The text tells us we humble ourselves for a
purpose so that at the proper time he may exalt you. We have to entrust
ourselves to God's proper time. Now, most of us, we understand the concept of
making ourselves low for a little while, for a defined, purposeful period. So
like, for example, you could take an unpaid internship and you could have to do
a lot of low level tasks. And when it's so long as you're an intern and you're
serving in that unpaid way, you are at the bottom of the totem pole. But at the
same time, you know that this internship is meant to prepare you for something
more meaningful and more significant. Humility means entrusting yourself to God
and to his timing, whatever that timing might be and for however long. At the
proper time is not a specific timetable, and that's kind of the point. God may
exalt you from your low position. Think of what he did for Joseph or for Daniel.
Or the proper time may be in the life to come. Either way, we entrust ourselves
to him in our suffering and in our circumstances. How many of you could look at
your lives and say, this is not how I thought I would be spending my retirement?
Or you could look at yourself and be like, this is not what I thought marriage
would be like. Or you could say, this is not what I anticipated when I started
down this career path. Humility means in the midst of struggle and suffering,
even when it's unexpected, even when we're like, I did not sign up for this.
Even when it's not part of our plans, when it goes on longer than we think, that
we humbly submit ourselves to God's wisdom and entrust ourselves to his care. So
you might hear this and say, okay, Matt, so you're just kind of saying, let go
and let God stop trying so hard. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen,
so stop worrying about it. No, that is spiritual passivity, and that's not what
this is. Humility is not spiritually signing off. It's not Buddhism. It's not
just letting go of everything. Rather, we're told this is what you are to do
with your struggles and with your suffering. Look at verse seven, casting all
your anxieties on him because he cares for you. Casting our anxieties upon the
Lord is actually a form of humbling ourselves. We proactively humble ourselves
by submitting ourselves to God's wisdom and by casting our anxieties on him. We
humble ourselves in this specific way by casting our anxieties upon the Lord.
Okay, so what does that mean, to cast your anxieties upon the Lord? First of
all, it is important to recognize anxiety is going to be part of our human
experience. We do not transcend anxiety by getting to some elevated spiritual
state. You don't need to feel guilty because you experience anxiety. The Apostle
Paul actually serves as a good model for us in this way. In 2 Corinthians 12, he
details the suffering that he's going through, the various sufferings that are
part of his story. Physical punishment, shipwrecks, beatings, sleeplessness,
danger, betrayal. And then on top of that, he continues in 2 Corinthians 12, 28
and says, and apart from other things, there's the daily pressure on me of my
anxiety for all the churches. If the Apostle Paul experienced anxiety, so will
we. If we have any type of responsibility for anything, we're going to have
anxiety. The question is really what you're going to do with that. And Peter
tells us we are to cast all of our anxieties upon the Lord. When he says that,
he is once again borrowing from Old Testament language. This comes from Psalm
55. Psalm 55, 22, the psalmist says, Cast your burden upon the Lord and he will
sustain you. He will never permit the righteous to be moved. If you look at
Psalm 55 more broadly, it's a psalm about being betrayed. These are the
preceding verses. Verse 20 and 21, the psalmist says, My companion stretched out
his hands against his friend. He violated his covenant. His speech was smooth as
butter, yet war was in its hands. His words were softer than oil, yet they were
drawn swords. Some of you who have experienced this before, complete betrayal
from a friend, from a loved one. It's agonizing to go through. It's confusing.
It's heartbreaking. And for most of us, our first impulse when that happens is
to fight back and try and get even, try to get revenge in some way. Think about
Peter, his first response when Jesus was initially betrayed in the garden. What
was it? Try to cut someone up. He grabbed his sword and tried to cut someone's
ear off. Peter came to realize that's not the way of Jesus. Even in betrayal,
even in suffering, we can cast our burdens upon the Lord. So casting, what does
that mean? It's to throw. It's to toss. It's to unburden. It's to offload. If
you think about the scene from Jesus's triumphal entry, when his followers were
preparing the way for Jesus to come into Jerusalem and everyone was throwing
their cloaks, when they tossed those cloaks, they were casting. So we cast our
anxieties on the Lord by committing them to prayer. We're saying I'm no longer
carrying this on my own. I am committing them to prayer. That's harder than it
sounds. It involves actual prayer, actually going before the Lord and committing
our cares and anxieties to him. A lot of times when we say that we will pray or
we intend to pray, we're not actually casting anything. In our mind, we kind of
realize, like, we need God's help. We might know it and then we talk about it.
But we're just not really actually casting anything. We're doing what Tim Keller
calls worrying in God's direction. We're not really praying. We're just kind of
thinking about it a lot and worrying about it. And how many of you, if you think
about this, you have a source of anxiety. It could be a health issue, could be
marital, it could be financial, it could be a family member. And if you reflect
back, how many hours have you spent talking about it and how many minutes have
you spent praying about it? It would be better to invert those ratios, to flip
that around. As C.S. Lewis says, it's easy for us to identify pride in other
people. We know what it looks like in other people when someone is self-
important or arrogant. But pride in our own hearts can be a lot more subtle. It
can manifest itself in ways that are harder for us to identify. And here we see
one of those more surprising, sneaky, subtle forms. Pray is a form of pride.
Taking all your anxieties upon yourself instead of casting them on the Lord is
actually a form of pride. It's really believing that you and your own power and
your solutions are what's needed for whatever you're worried about. The problem
for us is that prayer seems to us as something very intangible and we don't know
God's timing and we don't know how or when or if God will move. So we'd rather
take the problem on our own shoulders. And when we're anxious, we can cast our
anxieties upon the Lord or we can give into that form of pride. Let's say just
that you have an adult child and she's disappointing you with her choices and
you're burdened about it. Or let's say you have a spouse and he's not living up
to your expectations. So what's your first response? Do you worry about it and
then talk to other people about it and then start to pester into nag? Or do you
cast those cares upon the Lord in prayer? When I say that, I'm not saying that
there's not a place for counsel or for practical action. There can be. But this
really gets to where we go first in our hearts. Do we cast our cares upon the
Lord or do we take them on ourselves? And of course, if I put others first and
think about their needs instead of my own, there's going to be this accompanying
anxiety. Who's going to care for me? That's the mindset of another person in the
Bible who's known for their anxiety. In Luke 10, Jesus taught or this story is
related about Martha and Mary. The text says, as they went on their way, Jesus
entered a village and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she
had a sister called Mary who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his
teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving and she went up to him and
said, Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her
then to help me. But the Lord answered her, Martha, Martha, you are anxious and
troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good
portion, which will not be taken away from her. Our cares sometimes may in fact
be prideful. In Martha's case, she had a good impulse, but it seems like the
food, the hospitality, the way everything looked had gotten in the way of what
was actually important. And we've probably experienced this ourselves. Casting
our cares upon the Lord actually changes our perspective and what we even care
about. Casting can actually change the cares themselves. And we are able, we are
able to cast our cares upon the Lord when we recognize what Peter says, that he
cares for us. Pastor Micah mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, I'm
paraphrasing, but that persistent worry can be a manifestation of thinking that
God is not really in control. And think about this as we wrap up. These were
suffering believers. They were trying to serve the one true God in a society
that believed in many gods, a society that was polytheistic. That might have
resulted in all forms of suffering, family struggles, loss of friends, loss of
relationships, feeling disrespected, feeling unappreciated, feeling ignored.
Those are the struggles and suffering that can come from trying to be faithful
to Christ. And Peter reminds them, you can cast your cares upon the Lord because
he cares for you. He knows you. He loves you. He cares for you deeply and
personally. We can think, well, okay, but how do we actually know that when I
don't really have any tangible sense of that? How can we know that? Well, as we
wrap up, let's consider the example of Jesus as we look back in this letter.
Jesus fulfills all of this. 1 Peter 2, 21 through 24 says this, says this, for
to this you've been called because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an
example that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin. Neither was
deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return.
When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him
who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree that we
might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds, you have been healed.
Jesus clothed himself in humility. He was made low. He entrusted himself to the
will of the Father. Everything commended in these verses, 5 through 7, was
modeled for us by Jesus. And we can humble ourselves and cast our cares upon the
Lord rather than carrying them ourselves because he's sovereign. He has all
power. He is our father, and God takes great care for us. Jesus himself did not
take matters into his own hands, but continued entrusting himself to him who
judges justly. And that's where we find real security. It's in humility. When we
bow ourselves before him and when we cast our cares upon him. So we're going to
pray and then following that we'll sing, we'll sing an old song, but probably
new for most of us, that really is a prayer and entrusting of our cares to the
Lord. So would you pray with me?