Humility in Suffering
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As we come to the end of 1 Peter, we find Peter challenging us with a final reminder to stand firm in God’s grace, even while living as exiles.
Standing firm will involve us maintaining three attitudes:
1) Be humble.
1) Be humble.
Read verses 6-7.
The “therefore” in this verse calls us to look back at the previous verse...
God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble.
Those who are willing to submit to him find all the grace they need, while those who refuse to acknowledge their need don’t find it.
In light of that, God calls us to humble ourselves under his mighty hand.
Why would believers who are suffering because they follow Jesus need to be humble?
Because seasons of suffering can make us doubt two very important aspects of God’s character: his power, and his compassion.
In the hardest moments, we wonder, “God, are you even strong enough to take care of this? God, do you even care?”
Peter addresses both of those doubts, doesn’t he?
First, he reminds us that God’s hand is mighty.
The imagery he is drawing from here points us back to the Old Testament book of Exodus when God decimated the Egyptians and delivered his people.
His mighty hand brought judgment against all 2,200 gods the Egyptians worshiped as God showed himself powerful over the waters, the dry land, the skies, and everything in them.
God hasn’t grown weaker sense then.
That means he is able to deliver us from persecution and suffering for Christ, and he will when the time is right.
Although that may happen in this life, the rest of the letter points to the final deliverance we will receive when Jesus comes back.
He can deliver us now, but if that isn’t what is best, we know he will when the time is right.
Not only is he powerful, he is also good.
Look at verse 7. This is how we humble ourselves, by casting all our cares on him.
The word “casting” here is only used one other time in the New Testament.
It’s found in Luke 19:35, where Jesus is getting ready to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey. The Bible says that his disciples threw their coats on the back of the donkey so Jesus could sit on them.
When the disciples did that, do you think they held onto the corner of their cloak while Jesus rode on the donkey? No; they let them go and let the donkey carry them.
That gives us a great picture of what it means to cast our cares on him: we throw them on Jesus and let him carry them. We let them go.
We let him know what hurts, what confuses us, and what we can’t understand.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t ever think about them again or need to take steps of obedience to honor God through those situations. Rather, it means we let Jesus carry them.
Do you see the incredible statement attached to this?
He is the God who cares about us! He cares about you, so cast your cares on him.
How do you know he cares? Because he loved you enough to die for you.
The Bible says that God put our iniquity on Jesus:
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
We can cast our cares on the one who already carried our iniquity on the cross.
So what does it look like to be humble while we live as exiles? It means casting our cares on the God who cares for us, who is able to deliver us.
Before we move on, let’s address one more topic: if that’s what humility looks like, then what does pride look like?
It can look like holding onto our cares instead of putting them on Christ.
That means pride can look like worry or anxiety.
Here’s how one commentator stated it:
“Worry is a form of pride because when believers are filled with anxiety, they are convinced that they must solve all the problems in their lives in their own strength. The only god they trust in is themselves. When believers throw their worries upon God, they express their trust in his mighty hand, acknowledging that he is Lord and Sovereign over all of life.” (Schreiner)
You may have things in your life that predispose you to anxiety, and you may need counseling or medication to help control those factors.
However, there is a level with our experience with anxiety that we need to recognize is driven by pride: “I need to fix this, even if I don’t think I can.”
If you and I are going to stand firm in God’s grace, then we have to have the humility to believe that God knows what he is doing even when we don’t.
We have to cast our cares on him, all our anxieties and our worries, and trust that he is strong enough and good enough to take care of us, and one day, he will draw us out of this life of pain and into life with himself.
Are you humble enough to trust him to do it?
Be humble.
In our humility, though, we cannot simply become passive.
Instead, we must also...
2) Be alert.
2) Be alert.
Read verses 8-9.
This is the third time he has told us to be sober-minded, and this time, it serves as a book-end for us.
The first time we are told to be sober-minded is in 1:13, where we are challenged to get ready to act.
Here, we are being told to stay sober-minded because we are getting ready to be attacked.
Who is going to attack us? Our adversary and God’s, the devil.
Now, when I say that, what picture came into your head? For some around my age, the picture you have in your head may be of the devil as depicted in the Far Side cartoons or maybe the little red angel on the shoulder in movies like The Emperor’s New Groove.
One of Satan’s greatest tools has been to get us to trivialize him.
To some, these ideas sound superstitious and old fashioned, like saying “bless you” after someone sneezes since they just sneezed out a demon.
However, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Whether you want to admit it or not, there is a being out there who leads an army of other beings, and their desire is to destroy the kingdom God is building.
As an ambassador of that kingdom, you are one of his targets.
He isn’t just a tiny little red guy on your shoulder trying to get you to do bad things; rather, he is a lion who is seeking to devour you.
Some of us had the privilege of getting up close and personal with lions a few years ago when we went to Zimbabwe.
As a kid, I grew up watching nature documentaries on the Discovery channel. I had seen videos of lions chasing down their prey, and I had heard audio of their roars.
However, when we were in Zimbabwe, we had the privilege of sleeping near a lion breeding facility.
You could hear the roars overnight when the male lions would get worked up and start calling to each other.
One time, we even got to watch them eat. We stood outside a chain link fence while they released the adult male lions to come pounce on a pile of meet about 6 feet on the other side of the fence.
Here’s the view we had <<show lion picture>>
I wish I could take you there so you could see just how huge their paws and teeth were. I wish I could let you feel the sound of their guttural chuffing they did as they fought over the meat.
Watching that was both terrifying and beautiful.
This is the image I have in my head of my enemy who prowls around seeking for someone to devour.
He isn’t some dumpy guy in a red suit; the Bible describes Satan as a lion, and elsewhere as a dragon.
He is a formidable foe, so we need to stay alert.
He looks to devour us in several different ways, but it often comes back to distraction.
As long as he can keep you from turning to Christ or honoring him as your king, then he has accomplished his goal.
He devours some by working to hurt them so they will never open themselves to consider that God is kind and loving.
He devours others by making them successful so they never realize their need for God.
He devours some by keeping their focus on shiny things that never satisfy or relationships that always leave you empty.
He seeks to devour you.
How do we fight something like that?
By standing firm in the faith.
Look at verse 9 again...
When Satan’s lies try to distract you from honoring Christ, you stand firm in the faith.
What does that look like?
Our world is trying to paint a picture of sexuality that runs contrary to what God designed. He created sex as a gift for one man and one woman to enjoy within a covenant of marriage, and anything outside of that is contrary to his design and only leads to disappointment and pain.
Instead of buying into the lie that other ways of looking at gender and sexuality are okay, we stand firm in the faith by acknowledging that God’s design is better and will lead to greater human flourishing.
Our world says you need achieve a certain status to be happy, or to make a certain amount of money. What you find, though, is that the amount you need to be happy is always just out of reach. “I don’t know how much I need, but it is more than this.”
Standing firm in the faith is trusting that, just like Scripture says, our God will supply all our needs according to his riches that are in Jesus. We trust that whatever God has given us is still his and we are just stewards of it.
It means holding onto the trustworthiness and authority of the Bible when so many try to deny it.
Not only that, it means recognizing that you aren’t standing alone. Believers around the world and throughout history are and have gone through the same kinds of struggles, and by God’s strength, they stood firm and resisted the attacks Satan threw at them.
How often do evaluate the way you are spending your time and your money and your energy in life?
Are you staying alert to the fact that there is an enemy who is trying to distract and devour you?
Has he lulled you into a false sense of security?
Wake up! Be alert—there is an enemy out there, but you stand on a faith that has stood the test of time and will endure beyond the end of this world and its systems.
It is that endurance that leads us to the final way Peter calls us to stand firm in God’s grace...
3) Be hopeful.
3) Be hopeful.
There have been a number of hard truths in 1 Peter.
I am so grateful that through it all, God has woven this incredible theme of hope.
From the very beginning of the letter, we have seen that no matter how dark it gets, no matter how difficult life is, there is the hope that we will one day see Christ and enter his presence in a different way forever.
Look back at verse 10 and let your soul rest in these words....
He is the God of all grace. He can abundantly supply everything we need, and he gives us what we could never deserve time and time again.
He has called you to his eternal glory in Christ - Through Jesus’s death on the cross, his resurrection, and his lordship over creation, we will get to be near God and see him as he fully is forever.
Some of you have had a time when God worked in some incredible way to comfort you or to remind you of his power or his presence. Those tastes are often few and far between when we look at the suffering around us in the world.
Yet the promise for those in Christ is that we will be able to bask in that for all eternity!
On that day, look at the promises God makes for us. He will restore, establish, strengthen, and support us.
Some of the words here in the original Greek are unusual, so translators don’t always render them the same way. However, the emphasis is that God is going to right every wrong; he is going to set everything back in order.
That means when we say:
“I feel worn out and broken” - He will restore you. (Used in Matthew 4:21 to refer to the mending of nets.)
“I feel unsteady” - He will establish you.
“I feel weak” - He will strengthen you.
“I feel like I am failing” - He will support you.
We may not see these things happen right away; they may take time.
In fact, the suffering you endure for Christ may last the rest of your life.
As we have seen, though, our lives are short in light of eternity.
When we are 10,000 years into eternity, the 80 or 90 years we lived on earth will have passed like the blink of an eye.
That’s why in his conclusion, in the middle of all the greetings and well-wishings you often find at the end of a letter, Peter says this...
“I have written to you briefly in order to encourage you and to testify that this is the true grace of God. Stand firm in it.”
Stand firm in the grace God supplies while you live as an exile.
It won’t be long until we are all home with him.