Scripture tonight is 1 Peter 5, 6-7. 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. You may be seated. The winter of 1995 and the summer of 1996 provided bookends for one of the more difficult times in my life. In 1995, that winter, before Christmas, My father had gone out for a run, and he came back, and he was having pains, difficulty breathing. Of course, my father is a bit of a stubborn man, so he refused to allow my mom to call 911, but she persuaded him to let her drive him to the hospital, so they went. They put him on the treadmill to do a stress test, and he collapsed. in that winter, though he was spared from actually having a massive heart attack, he had quadruple bypass. I remember very clearly walking into the recovery room and seeing my dad there in a state that I'd never seen before, could not have ever anticipated seeing him lying there on a table with his blood being pumped for him through a machine. and his lungs lifting and lowering through the air of a machine. So we passed that Christmas and then I graduated high school in June and just after that we went down to a town called St. Augustine which is where we were living when we came out here and we were celebrating. We went out for ice cream and that night my mom got bit by a fire ant And she started to have reactions. And I also remember very clearly the first responders coming in and cutting off her shirt and putting on the equipment so they could read her vitals and injecting her with an EpiPen and going through all the things that they do to deal with anaphylactic shock. And for the rest of that week, for the next five days, seeing my mom in a coma. And so that was a difficult time. A time that provided plenty of opportunities to become anxious. And yet it doesn't take those types of things to become anxious. It doesn't take those types of things to cause us to worry. It takes even the little things, the mundane things of this life for us to turn our eyes away from the Lord and to begin to worry about what will happen next and what will happen as a result of this or that. The bills that we have to pay, just the daily things in our lives can cause us to worry, can cause us great anxiety. And, of course, in this context, in Peter's epistle, he's been talking about the fact that we're in this sin fallen world, the sin filled world. We are Christians in a world that is filled with sinners. He has told us that trials will come. Do not be surprised, he said in chapter four, at the fiery trials that will come upon you to test you as if something strange were happening to you. Jesus promised that in the world you will have tribulation. And, of course, he did follow that with the statement that we should take heart because he has overcome the world. Take heart. I have overcome the world. And so even as he is telling us, warning us, promising us even, that in this world we have tribulation, we'll have many opportunities for anxiety, many opportunities to worry, that none of these things are outside of the scope of his power. He has overcome them all. And that is the good news. And Peter then, because of that good news, because of his power, he tells us what we just read in verses six through seven, that we are not to be anxious. that when anxieties arise, we are to cast them on the Lord. We are to humble ourselves, he says, before our caring and our mighty God. But what is this humility of which Peter speaks here? He says, humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God. And therefore, it sounds like he's making a connection between what he's saying here and what preceded these two verses. In verse five, if you'll remember, we went over that the last time I was with you a few weeks ago. He says, clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, tonight. And so there's clearly some kind of relationship between these two passages, but what is that relationship? It's an interesting statement. He has, in verse five, discussed our relationship with one another as Christians, as the body of Christ, that we are to exercise humility toward one another as we interact with one another, as we live with one another, dwell with one another, bear one another's burdens. We are to interact with one another primarily through the attitude of humility. We are to consider one another as better than ourselves. We are to look after one another's interests over our own. We are, following the example of the Good Shepherd, to lay down our lives for one another. And Peter has said, furthermore, that if we fail to do that, if we conduct ourselves and interact with one another and our relationships with one another are defined with pride. Then the Lord opposes that. And he will oppose those who act that way in pride. He opposes the proud. But he gives grace to the humble, and so he says, if you will conduct yourselves in pride toward one another and toward your brothers and sisters, he will humble you before them. The basis, of course, of this entire understanding of how we are to relate with one another is Christ and his work. Christ, who was humble. Christ, who considered others as better than himself. He looked after our own needs before his own glory. He was willing to set his glory aside in order to deal with our needs, and that is to be saved. that is to be rescued from the wrath of his father for our sins, which we justly deserve. He set aside his glory. He humbled himself so that he would look out for our interests. And then he laid down his life for us to save us. And this is, of course, though he's better than us, He truly is better than all of us, right? And yet, He lays down His life for us. He humbles Himself. Even when we were His enemies, He humbled Himself. And so, that was what verse 5 was all about. He was saying, humble yourselves before one another. Why? Because this is how Christ has treated you. Has treated each one of you. And so do that with one another. The focus of tonight's verses, though, is different, which makes this, therefore, so interesting. Verse five spoke of our humility before one another, and verses six through seven, on the other hand, speak of our humility before God and before his might. Verse five had that warning attached to it. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. And yet in verses six through seven, we have this tender promise that he makes to us. He cares for us. So we go through, I think you'll see how tender that promise is and how wonderful that promise is. So then if there are all those differences, those major differences between the two passages and their focuses, then what is their relationship? I think it's found in that general principle that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. In verse five, what that meant was that inasmuch as we are proud towards one another, God will oppose us. He will make us humble before one another. But here, what is meant is that we are to have the right attitude as we come into his presence to bring our anxieties to him. As we bring our cares to him, we are to come into his presence with the right attitude in our heart. When we cast our cares upon the Lord, we are to acknowledge that we do not deserve his care, but only his wrath. That the only exercise of his mighty arm toward us should be in executing justice rather than in executing salvation for us. That we are humbled that he should care for us at all, because after all, we understand that we are sinners and that we only really deserve one thing, and that is his wrath. And so he's saying when we come into his presence, we are to approach him with this attitude that we do not deserve his care and provision for us. And therefore, we are not to come into his presence demanding that he give us anything as if we deserve any of his blessing, that we are not to come into his presence with any sense of entitlement, demanding that he owes us any good thing. And if we do approach him in this manner and with this attitude, then we can be sure that he will oppose us in our prayers. And so that is the relationship between the two passages. To put this a little bit differently than we are to bring our cares to God in Christ. We are to acknowledge that our access before his throne and into his presence is only real because his flesh was torn apart for us, giving us that access into his presence, that we could come into his presence pure and unblemished and unstained and spotless because we have been purified with the blood of his perfect and righteous son who he sent in humility to die for us. We can go into his presence because of that, and only on those grounds can we go into his presence to bring our cares. Apart from the work of Christ in our behalf, apart from our adoption in Christ as his children, then we cannot come into his presence at all. except to be judged. And so this humility in verses six through seven means that we are to approach God as those who can come into his presence only because of Christ, only because we've been purified with his blood, apart from which we would be wretched, we'd be completely stained and ugly with sin, objects of his wrath. But how are we to do this? How are we to humble ourselves before him? Peter says that we are to humble ourselves under his mighty hand by casting our anxieties upon him. We've already talked about all the different ways in which we can become anxious. It's just a simple fact in this fallen world. It's a simple fact because we are sinners by nature. Though we've been saved and though we are new creations, and yes we are, we must realize that we cannot wallow in the past of who we were before Christ. We cannot consider ourselves as we were outside of Christ any longer. Paul in Romans 6 wants to make sure that we begin to consider ourselves as dead to sin and alive to Christ. And so we must, we must realize this very thing that we are indeed new creations in Christ. Yet there is still that old man isn't there that we hate, that I hate, and I know you hate. That old man who's still there, who still wants us to turn our eyes off the true object of our faith and to focus on the situation, to focus on ourselves. It's just a simple reality that on this side of heaven, this side of glory, we will become anxious. It's a simple fact. And yet we need to understand a few things about this anxiety, especially in light of Peter's statement that we are to humble ourselves by casting these anxieties on him. What is this anxiety? And there are two aspects to this anxiety that we need to understand and grasp to understand what Peter is saying here. The first is that this anxiety is a result of our lack of faith that the Lord is sovereign over every aspect of our lives. That he is in complete and utter control over every single thing that happens in our lives. He is in complete and utter control over the timing of everything in our lives. So that nothing is outside of his control. He is perfectly sovereign over every aspect of our lives. He exercises that sovereignty over every aspect of our lives in love and in tender mercy. And this is why Peter points to God's mighty hand. Humble yourselves under God's mighty hand. Why? Because this is the expression, this is the picture of God's power, of His sovereignty. You cannot imagine anyone trying to arm wrestle God and win. His arm is mighty and it's mighty to save. This is the expression of the sovereignty. This is where his power is to be found. It is in his mighty hand and in his outstretched arm. And so Peter is pointing us to that, to his power and to his sovereignty, to his power to exercise his sovereignty over everything and that he does in fact With that power exercises sovereignty over every aspect of our lives. We are never outside of his sovereignty, never outside of his power. And no circumstances in our lives are ever outside of his power or sovereignty. And so this is the first way in which anxiety arises by a lack of faith and turning our eyes away from that mighty hand of God. The second is that it comes from an idolatrous faith in ourselves. We turn our eyes from God and we've put our faith in ourselves that we actually have ultimate control, that we are actually sovereign over all the affairs of our lives, that somehow we know best for our lives and for ourselves that the timetable that we have is better than God's timetable. Not times table, that would be what we're doing in homeschool or other school. But our timetable, our timeframe, when we want things to happen is different and is better than God's time frame. And this is why Peter tells us to humble ourselves under God's mighty hand. by casting our anxieties upon him. He's telling us to relinquish our control of our lives. He's telling us that we are to admit that we are weak and helpless and are totally dependent upon God for everything because he, in fact, is the sovereign one. He, in fact, is mighty and that we have no strength in and of ourselves to handle these situations, to handle our lives. He is the one who does. We are to acknowledge in our minds and in our hearts that he is sovereign. We are to trust in that. When things don't go our way, when things bring about that anxiety, we are to turn from that and just simply to submit and just to say that God is and that God is sovereign. One way in particular that we struggle to humble ourselves in this manner by casting our anxieties upon the Lord is by focusing too much on the future. The future that we have no control over. The future that we cannot see clearly. And isn't it the case that so often we build ourselves up, we work ourselves up in anxiety thinking about the future and thinking about how things are going to turn out and in the end they end up turning out completely different. We convince ourselves that we have certain predictive gifts and that we know exactly what's going to happen. And we know exactly how the Lord is going to act in a certain situation. We know exactly what the Lord's plans are, that His outcome is going to be in a certain way. And then He says, no, you're wrong about that. And so we realize that we really don't have any control over the future, that we don't really have a clear view as to what the future holds. And yet this is one area in which we struggle the most. This is why I think Jesus brings this up in the Sermon on the Mount. He says, therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient is the day for its own trouble. And yet we get so distracted by the uncertainty of the future that we completely forget about the things that he has called us to do on this day. That this day he has called us to do whatever it is. But we turn our eyes off of those things and fail to do those things to His glory and to the best of our ability because we become debilitated by looking at the future and becoming anxious over what the future holds, not knowing what the future holds, not knowing when that future will come and bring us answers that we long for. We get so caught up in that. And Peter says to answer that, that at the proper time God will exalt you. Humble yourselves under his mighty hand so that at the proper time he might exalt you. And this again goes back to the simple fact that so often how we define proper time is very different than how God defines proper time. To him, proper time is perfectly proper. And our proper timing is often very wrong. But he says at the proper time. And to stretch that out, to think about that from the big picture. We may not even in this life feel relief from these anxieties. We may never in this life feel like that moment of exaltation has occurred. We may have small pictures of that. And yet what Peter is telling us is that in all of our life, in everything that we do, we are to humble ourselves under God's mighty hand so that the proper time he may exalt us. And on that day, that last day, what he has called the day of the revelation of Jesus Christ, The day of our salvation. That will be the day when He exalts us. That is the proper time. That is the ultimate proper time. If we want to distinguish between lower P proper and uppercase P proper. That is the uppercase P proper time. And we will be exalted on that time. This has been His point throughout the entire epistle. You may experience humility. You may experience trials and sufferings. Moments of anxiety here on this earth and in this world and during this lifetime. But there is that day when you will be glorified. And this is why he has set the tone throughout this epistle, focusing on Christ and His sufferings and His subsequent glories. And he's saying you are bound to Him. And so as you endure sufferings and anxieties, you will with Him experience those subsequent glories. And that's why we pray in our congregational prayers for that day to come quickly. We long for that day. We want that day to come. We want those subsequent glories. In the meantime, he's telling us to humble ourselves. In the meantime, he's telling us to walk by faith, not by sight. Let me say one more thing about this issue of humbling ourselves or not humbling ourselves before the Lord as he tells us to here, not casting our cares on the Lord as he tells us to here. As we fail to do that, as we hold on to our anxieties and we try to solve them ourselves, we open up the door for further temptation. And I will simply appeal to your experience at this point. You know in those moments when you become anxious, when you've failed to turn to the Lord and to cast your anxieties upon the Lord, you can see how that impacts your relationships with those around you, how you treat those that are around you, how you even may experience more temptation in yourself to sin. And this only makes sense. Because as we hold on to these anxieties, as we try to solve them in our own strength and power and wisdom, we are acting according to the flesh. And in doing so, we are opening up the door for more temptation. We are opening up the door for Satan to come in and to further remove our minds and our eyes from Christ. We act in pride, and that pride leads to idolatry, and that idolatry leads to anxiety, which only leads to more pride, because, no, I can handle this myself, which only leads to more anxiety, or idolatry, and then more anxiety. And the cycle continues. Until one point, that cycle is broken. And how is that broken? Well, I hope. Tonight, it's broken just by you hearing this sermon. But if you're like me, oftentimes, because I'm thick-skulled, some people say hard-headed, some people say dense. If you're like me, sometimes it takes being brought to that point where you have to confess that you know absolutely nothing, that you've been absolutely stupid and foolish up to this point in trying to handle this stuff yourself, that you are weak and helpless, that you are completely dependent upon Him and upon His strength and upon His mercy and love. Peter is saying, rather than this idolatry, rather than this pride, rather than trying to handle your anxieties yourself, cast them on the Lord because He is the one with the mighty hand. I think there's one other struggle that we have when it comes to humbling ourselves before the Lord by casting our anxieties upon Him. And I think that struggle, whether or not we realize it, is that we do not really and we do not fully believe that the Lord cares for us. we, I think, unintentionally do that which the world does. The world says that they will not believe in God because bad things happen in the world. Therefore, they cannot believe in God because either he is not all-powerful or he is not all-good. And you've heard this before. If he was all-powerful, he could have stopped it. But, okay, I'll grant that he's all-powerful. That just means he's not all-good because he didn't stop it. And so this is the great charge. We know it technically as the Odyssey, but this is the great charge that many bring against God and the justification that many bring for not believing in God. And so what I'm saying is that we have our own form of doing this. When we experience trials and we have anxieties arise, we do essentially the same thing. We have essentially the same argument in our heads. Rather than humbling ourselves before God, we think at some level that God is either not able, he doesn't really have that mighty hand that Peter has talked about. Either God is not able or he does not care enough. And somehow we convince ourselves of this, even though we know better. We know the gospel, we know the truth of His love, and yet we still convince ourselves one of these two things must be true, because after all, I wouldn't be going through this difficult time. And I'm not saying we do this explicitly, that we sit down and intentionally reason this thing out in this way. I'm just simply saying, reflect on this for a minute, and I think you'll realize that this is exactly what we are doing anyways. We are convincing ourselves, we are acting on the presupposition, on the basis that God either is not able to handle this and so we're going to handle it ourselves or he doesn't really care enough and we convince ourselves one of these two things, maybe even both. And yet Peter tells us that we are to cast our anxieties upon him because he does care for us and he does so with a mighty hand. The interesting thing is that when Peter uses this word for caring, when it is used in this sense in the rest of the New Testament, we only have negative examples of this idea of caring. For example, in John chapter 10, when Jesus is comparing himself to the false shepherds or the hired servants, he is saying these hired servants, when the wolves come in, when they see the wolves coming in to attack the flock, they flee. They leave the flock there to perish at the mouths of those wolves to save their own lives because they care nothing for the sheep." Of course, he's contrasting their actions and their motives with his own. He's saying, I am the good shepherd, however, and I don't leave when the wolves come. In fact, I lay down my lives for the sheep. This is how I show you that I care for you. is that I lay down my life for you, so that you might be spared from their attack, and you might be saved, and you might have life. That is how I prove that I care for you, and what I'm saying is that these don't care at all for the sheep, because they flee. The second thing that we see is later on in John, in chapter 12, this incredible scene when Mary Magdalene comes to Jesus. He's in this house, and she anoints his feet with very expensive perfume. And then she wipes his feet with her hair. And we're told that this house is filled with this pleasing aroma. And this is an incredible picture. Because here we have this woman of prostitution. Here we have this woman who had once been demon bound many times. Who is entering into this act of profound worship and humility before her savior and her Lord. And we are told this pleasing aroma fills the house. This language and this imagery of the temple itself, that she's offering up this incredible worship, and it's being accepted by God. An incredible thing. A woman like that, a sinner like that, can offer up worship that is pleasing to God. And we are told that Judas Iscariot is there. And he begins to challenge her to Jesus. And saying, why couldn't we have taken this bottle, which if we sold it, we could have made 300 days wages worth, and we could have distributed that to the poor. Why this waste? And so clearly he's not seeing the spiritual reality that's going on here. Clearly he's not understanding the grace that can be found in Jesus Christ. But then John says something interesting. He writes this. He says, Judah said this not because he cared for the poor. There's that word again. He said this not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief and having charge of the money bag he used to help himself to whatever was put in it. And Judas was such a thief that not even all the money in the money bag that they had there was enough because he accepted 30 shekels so that he could betray his Lord and have him crucified. That is the heart of Judas Iscariot and why he is always mentioned as the one who betrayed his Lord. He cared not for the poor. only for himself. And this is the picture that we see that those who do not care are those who are selfish, they are self-absorbed, they seek only their own interest at the expense of others. And so those are the negative examples. which means that we would expect to find the exact opposite trait in the one who truly does care. And in fact, that is what we find. He looks away from himself to our interests, to our betterment, laying down his own life, sacrificing himself, caring for us, that we might have life, that we might be brought into his presence. that He would take in His mighty arm all of our anxieties and deal with them in care and in love. And so this really is the greatest element in this whole discussion. We are to cast our cares upon the Lord because He loved us enough to die for us. And if He died for us, How then can we say that he does not care for us? And if he has met our greatest eternal and infinite need, how will he fail to take care of our finite and temporal needs? And if he rose again from the dead in his own power, How can we still doubt that He is able to take care of our needs and anxieties here on this earth? And to do so to the fullest. So we must become convinced more and more that His love for us defines our entire relationship. His love for us defines His entire relationship to us. Every aspect of it, even when He disciplines us. As unpleasant as that is, it's because He loves us. We are never outside of that. And yet, when we go through hard times, even when we go through those small things in life, the small things that derail us just a little bit, the little bumps in the road, that somehow lead to derailing our walk, Even when we go through those things, we are tempted to think that somehow we have slipped out of the scope of his love for us. That somehow we have become separated from his love. We might be tempted to say, Lord, if you really loved me, why is my father laying there on that table with that tube down his throat? And Lord, if you really loved me, why the week after my graduation would you have my mom in a coma for a week? In the story that I told you several weeks ago, Lord, if you really loved me, why would I have to be taking my son off of life support and hearing his final little seven-year-old breaths as he died? Why? If you loved me, why? But in these moments, And in the smaller things, we need to remember that he can never stop loving us. That we never escape his loving gaze. Even many evangelical songs ask the Lord to do things like wrap us up in his arms of love. And yet, while we may feel in our hearts and may be tempted to think by Satan that somehow we have escaped his loving embrace, we need to remember that he has never let us go. We are still there, still wrapped close to his breast. And that never changes. God cares for us. And he exercises his might to care for us. And so there are no circumstances, there are no anxieties that can remove his mighty arm from us. No one can snatch us out of his hand and out of his grip. This sin-filled world, the sin that remains in us, gives us so many opportunities to become anxious, so many opportunities to worry, to turn our eyes away from God, to turn our eyes away from His loving might. His mighty arm is a loving arm. But we must turn our eyes from ourselves. We must cease trusting in ourselves. We must cease to believe that we have all the answers, that we are sovereign, that we are wise, that we have the ability to take care of our anxieties on our own and our own strength. And in fact, the more that we do so, the more that we trust in ourselves, the more anxious we will become. Because we are quite incapable and we are quite foolish. But the Lord cares for us and He is all-powerful to care for us and to take care of us. In our weakness, He is made strong. He loves us with this infinite, eternal, and unchangeable love that no circumstances can remove. We are never outside of His love, not even when we go through trials, not even when we become anxious. We are never out of His love. Let us respond to this great love by humbling ourselves before him, by casting our anxieties upon him and letting go of them ourselves, knowing that he cares for us, knowing that he is our mighty and caring God. Let us pray. What do we do? ask that you would help us to turn to you, to look to you, to look at the incredible picture that we have of you here. This combination of caring and of mighty put into one sentence. That you both care for us and you are mighty to care for us. We pray that you'd help us to turn away from ourselves and to cease trusting in ourselves. to cease trusting in our own wisdom and our own abilities and our own strength, but rather to surrender all of that, to cast our anxieties upon you, humbling ourselves before you, knowing that you are mighty and that you are strong and that you are wise, knowing most of all that you care for us and that you demonstrate that care for us even in the temporal things, by dealing with our eternal need, and that is to be forgiven, that is to have grace, that is to be shown mercy. You've done that. Help us then to know, if you have dealt with our eternal need, that you will take care of all the others, that the same love that governed that sacrifice, that drove you to the cross, You still have toward us and for us, and you will take care of us. We pray, Lord, that you'd help us to turn our eyes away from ourselves and to you. Lord, we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.