I love it when the Word of God catches me off guard, when a single word or phrase causes me to stop and ask, “Wait… What?”

Walk with me through 1 Peter 5:6-7 in the NET, which is the translation I’m reading from today.

And God will exalt you in due time

We see this promise and others like it many times in the Word. Psalm 91 offers another great reminder in verse 15 where God says, “I will rescue them and bring them honor.” We are grateful to know that we will see this happen in due time, but when is our due time? Well, the sentence isn’t finished yet. As is common with God’s promises, there are conditions. In this case…

if you humble yourselves under his mighty hand

Ah. There it is. That little word, “if,” followed by that big phrase, “humble yourselves.” Seriously, we humans have a hard time with humility, which isn’t surprising when you consider that the devil’s sin is pride. If he fell for it, so can we. And we do. I mean, have you ever caught yourself being proud of how humble you were and then abruptly realized, “Um… Well… Maybe I still have some work to do here”? I have. It’s been a while, but I have. 

To continue…

So far so good, right? It’s not news that God demands humility. If I were to start tossing out passages that address this specific issue you’d stop reading before I was done; there are that many. It was the next word that really caught my attention this time, the word that had me reading what follows very carefully. The word is “by.”

by casting all your cares on him because he cares for you.

Yes, here we are at a verse fragment we’ve all heard repeatedly. “Listen, dear Christian, cast all your cares on him because he cares for you!”

But are we really paying attention to what Peter is saying here, or are we repeating a cliche that has become too familiar to affect us anymore? This verse isn’t merely about us turning all our cares over to God, which sounds easy when we all know it’s usually not. No, this is about much more.

Read 1 Peter 5:6-7 again, slowly.

And God will exalt you in due time, if you humble yourselves under his mighty hand by casting all your cares on him because he cares for you.

We humble ourselves BY giving God all our cares, everything that has us concerned, tied up in knots, or scared half out of our minds. This isn’t merely a pleasant-sounding platitude: It’s a command, and if we want what Peter mentions at the beginning of verse 6 we’d best be on the mark by the end of verse 7.

We must humble ourselves under God’s hand. How do we do it? By giving all our cares over to Him and trusting Him to deal with them. This trust both requires humility and inspires humility. If we insist on hanging onto our cares, not surrendering them to Him, we deny His divinity, His omnipotence, and we demonstrate that we imagine we are more able to handle the things that matter to us than He is.

Don’t get me wrong. If you’ve been around here long at all you know I fight this battle myself. Sometimes I hand my concerns over to Him only to look down and find I’ve somehow drawn them back into my own hands without even realizing it. The key is that I humble myself all over again and throw them back to Him. Yes, I mean throw. That is what “casting” is. It’s sending something away from you with force. It’s crying out, “God, I really don’t want this even if it looks like I do. Please take it back again! I do trust you!” as I chuck it at him and put my figurative hands behind my back.

True trust requires humility, and we prove that we have humbled ourselves (He doesn’t do it for us.) when we entrust all our cares to Him and leave them there. And, when we cast all our cares on Him, we are inevitably humbled by His loving response and faithfulness. It’s a beautiful cycle.

It’s so beautiful that it’s hardly necessary to go back to the first part of verse 6, but of course we will.

And God will exalt you in due time…

Your due time is coming my brother, my sister. I don’t know how or when, but if you do as Peter says you can know God will respond. Just do it. Humble yourself under His hand by trusting Him to handle everything you care about, and your due time will eventually come.

Celebrating Jesus!
Tammy C