Humility

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.

Humbling ourselves before another goes hand in hand with being humble before God. Humility here, that's just among equals. Image bearers, saved by the same blood, but humbling ourselves before God, well, that should be a no-brainer. He's God, we're not. We're weak, he is mighty. Notice what Peter says as a purpose for why you would humble yourself before God, so that he will exalt you. Now, if you want a simple summary of what's wrong with us. It's that we seek our own exaltation in our own way. This is a simple summary of sin. Seeking our exaltation, our satisfaction, our delight, our resolution in our own way, rather than trusting God to actually exalt us in the way he has decided. It's trusting God's ways are better than our ways. That's the right way of seeking humility. We should trust His commands are better than our morals. We should trust His will is right over against our sinful desires. We should trust He is just and generous. His blessings are better than things we actually want. He's the one who pulls us out of trouble and into eternal rewards. The key here is do we actually trust God to give us everything that is right and good. Do we trust Him enough to humble ourselves, to trust Him that He will exalt us? You go back and you read those prayers of Hannah and Mary in the midst of confusing, difficult, painful times. They're trusting the God who exalts. They're trusting the God who is good beyond what they understand. It's very important for us to understand as elect exiles, because we live in the upside down kingdom. According to Christ, according to the kingdom of heaven, suffering is the path to glory. That's one of the major motifs we've seen throughout first Peter. According to Jesus' very straightforward teaching, whoever seeks to be great, they seek to serve, they seek to be lowly. And then the very clear teaching of this passage that's throughout scripture, God exalts the lowly and brings down the proud. Let's go back to the garden. God gave man everything they could ever want. God gave man things he didn't even know he needed. But the temptation was, oh no, he's holding back. There's something better for you than what God has. There's a way in which you can take matters into your own hands and get a better exaltation and position than what God's given you. You can see better if you just take things in your own hands. And seeking to see better, they lost everything. Humbling ourselves before God is just trusting His commands, His prohibitions, His boundaries are right. He gives us everything good and He gives us what's best. The way to humble ourselves here specifically though is verse 7, casting all your anxieties on Him because he cares for you. Let's just slow down. Those words, he cares for you. Everything else we say doesn't matter unless you believe those four words. That's it. If you walk away with something, elect exile, he cares for you. Just let it wash over you. Let's say it together. He cares for you. Say it with me. He cares for you. Now you can say it to one another. He cares for you. So simple to say. So easy to forget. So encouraging. But difficult to hold on to in the middle of some kind of trial or complication. But this That's the bottom line. Look, it's the foundation for everything he said. He cares for you. He knows your sin more than you do. He knows your anxiety more than you do. He is fully aware of all the problems, the difficulties, the pain, whatever you think you've done that would cause Him to not care for you. The key declaration, if you are following and believing in Christ, He cares for you. I want us to just linger here because These simple little declarations are what we need to know most clearly and say most often to one another. You wanna talk about speaking the truth in love, here's truth that we'll always be loving to say. Let's not overcomplicate it. We wanna try to say something more profound and better, but there's nothing really much better than this. He cares for you. He's aware of your anxiety. He's aware of your trouble. He's aware of your fear. He is fully aware of all that's wrong, and he cares for you. This is especially necessary when we're anxious, overwhelmed, twisted up in anxiety, where fears paralyze us. Anxiety is one of the most dangerous threats to humility because they produce in us self-pity, which is one of the most dangerous forms of pride. Self-pity is when we take all of our fears, real or imagined or exasperated or exaggerated, we take those and we just focus in on them. And we become so focused in on them, there's a pride where it's just my problem. And it creates a self-pity where we're just focused on us. And the reason that's a danger to humility because humility says I'm going to take that to God and trust Him with it. There's a weird exaltation of self when all we're worried about is our problem and our pain and our frustration, our fear. Because what we want to do is handle that ourselves. Anxiety, for some reason, we want to think, all right, anxiety, we're going to put this in a box, we're going to lock it up, and I'm going to store it deep inside. The only person who wants you to do that is Satan. I get why, and I've experienced why that seems to be rational. to kind of store that inside, because it's significant, it's terrifying, I want to store, but when we store it inside, it infects faith. It hinders faith, it hinders humility. What God invites us to do is not store it up and lock it away, The most intuitive thing to do with anxiety is store it and hide it and protect it. The most counterintuitive thing to do is open up about it. But what God instructs us here to do is open up and cast it upon him. Now, that's going to be hard to do. And this is why it's a plural command. There's a way in which somebody might need to be holding your hands while you're seeking to hold it out for God. When we have anxiety, when we have real fear, we can put it off. And notice these two things go together. Putting on humility is trusting God so we can cast off anxiety. You can put on humility, which is trusting the God who cares for you so that we can cast off the anxiety. It's hard to let go of control of that which we're most terrified of until we see that God in his mighty power cares for us. Faith says God cares for me despite my sin and my circumstance. Faith says he who is mighty cares for me. I can trust him. Faith says I will trust him with my anxiety and my burden. I wanna flip this passage kind of upside down. I wanna walk backwards. The truth. He cares for you. That is the first belief. He cares for you. You can trust him with everything. If you trust him with your sin, you can trust him with your anxiety. He cares for you. If he cares for you, you know then second, you can trust him with your anxiety. You cast it upon him. If he cares for you and you trust him with your anxiety, he gives grace to that humble action. By giving grace and humble action, we now know we can be humble towards one another and help each other in those anxieties. And then it goes on. The very foundation of husbands honoring wives and wives submitting and trusting that you can submit to a governing authority or a master. What's all the foundation of God Almighty cares for you. If there's one thing we're going to take away, elect exiles, is those four words. That's what I call easy load ammunition. Or what you need to put in your record player. It's simple. He cares for you. It's what we need to know to say to one another. If anxious right now, you're going to see family on some upcoming trip and you're not sure how to talk with Uncle so-and-so. or what next year has in store, or how to really wrestle with all the different troubles in the world, or marriage tensions, or desiring to see your children obey, or come to faith, or just scared of the unknown. This is God's medicine. He cares for you. He cares for you. And if you have a difficult time believing that, Christmas is when we see Christ, the Son of God, He comes down to show He cares for us. But just like last week, the cure for pride is looking at the cross, the cure for anxiety is looking at the cross. God Himself, God's own Son, came to take our sin away by taking it upon Himself. He takes the punishment of God away from us by taking it upon himself. He takes away the curse so that we can be blessed by taking it upon himself. If you're restless, if you can trust him with anxiety, look to the cross and see how much he cares about you. The second instruction. Be humble towards one another, towards God. And that means we're trusting him. Well, now the second is be watchful. Watchful, this is verses eight and nine.

Be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of sufferings are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.

Superminded, watchful. Those two words are informing each other. Those two words are together for a reason. We've seen superminded before in chapter four, verse seven, in a couple of places. There's a seriousness to that command. There's a be serious and watchful. There's an alertness. Now, as we think about this, as the elect together, there's humility within the church. And as exiles, we're looking outside and we're serious and watchful. There's real trouble out there. He names the trouble. We have an adversary, the devil, Satan. It's important we understand who Satan is An angel created by God who rebelled against God? An angel with great power? Who has some pretty straightforward basic schemes that seem to be very effective, even though they're very straightforward. He lies. He tempts. He accuses. And all that brings about killing and destroying. So that's important. If you're not writing that down, you probably want to write that down. Those are the four things you should be aware of. Satan lies, Satan tempts, Satan accuses. He kills and destroys. Here, the word is devour. Now, we cannot ever say the devil made me do it. He lies to us, telling us the things we already want to believe. We like the lies. He tempts us with sins and desires we already have. He's a pretty significant student of us and knows how to tempt us with sins we actually already have within. He accuses us not of false sins. He actually accuses us of real sin we've committed. That's what makes the accusation so powerful. It's just, he accuses us when Christ has already paid the penalty. He lies, telling us things we want to believe. He tempts us with desires we already have. And he accuses us of sin we've really committed. That's why it's effective. And by doing these, he devours, he destroys. If we go back to 1 Peter 3.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope.

The God who cares gives life. Notice our enemy devours, destroys, seeks to bring destruction. There's a cosmic battle. It's a battleground, not a playground. why we're called to be serious, sober minded, watchful. Now God in his grace has given us a battle plan. Look at verse nine, pretty straightforward. Resist him. Okay, that almost sounds like just stop it, right? Just stop doing it. seems pretty clever he knows how to he knows how to just tickle our ears enough to believe the lie he knows we already want in terms of justifying sin it's it's resist him who's devouring by trusting him who gives life Paul's command in Colossians 2 or Ephesians 6 is very similar stand firm resist him Notice, I gave you the basic schemes of Satan, but the most important way to live the healthy, full Christian life and not be tossed to and fro is by being on the rock. You stand firm by knowing Christ. You stand firm by being a living stone, being built up on the true living stone, into that holy temple held together. If you don't know how to stand firm, you grow closer to the very truth of God. Know the God who's made promises and fulfilled them. Christmas is a great season to just meditate upon our songbook for that. Know God has elected you, given you eternal life, brought you with his precious blood of Christ. Know Jesus will return and bring a reward or a judgment based upon how we've lived. Let's keep it simple. Be firm in your faith knowing God cares for you. If we know that truth, if we know he has all authority and he's good, he cares for us, we're able to stand against the lies and temptations of Satan. Notice it says Satan roars like a lion. That roaring is accusing you of sin you've committed to try to scare you to hide in shame. That roaring is Satan lying to you, trying to give you that excuse you want to continue in sin. That roaring is tempting you, that you need to not worry about God's warning. He's trying to frighten us away from God and, well, any other direction is fine. As long as we're not standing firm in Christ, he doesn't care what other direction we go in. stand firm in your faith we as god's holy temple must stand firm with one another and for one another as we seek to hear god's word share god's word and remember it together notice verse 9 there's a No, in the same kind of suffering, one of the most difficult things is to isolate ourselves and then pretend it's just us anyway. Well, no, we got to remember that same kind of sufferings are going on all over the place. Throughout the brotherhood, we see there verse 12, we notice the command, stand firm in it. Another brother Savonis is coming. He's exhorting you with the true grace of God, stand firm in it. There's even those saved in Babylon of all places. You want to talk about being in exile. Here, there's a way in which we recognize God's people are scattered everywhere. The assumption is there's small little groups. He's speaking to this general epistle to all these different cities. They have small little groups of Christians who feel that smallness, who feel that fear, who feel that anxiety. And be aware, God's hand is everywhere, protecting His people, caring for His people. If you think about what this means to resist him firm in your faith, I wanna go back up to verse six. Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God. A wonderful search with all this free time you have during Christmas. Just the mighty right arm of God stretched out throughout scripture. That's how he brought about the exodus. That's how we talk about Christ coming down, the mighty right hand of God coming down with great power to save. We're humbling ourselves under the mighty hand of God that is not too short to reach us. The mighty hand of God that has shown he cares for us. I wanna try to pull this together with last week's text. Christ is the true shepherd, the good shepherd, the chief shepherd is what we saw last week. When we think about that picture I tried to present where, as I think with the church, there's the kind of the center, and then there's the members and believers who are drawing near that center, and then there's the outside circle. Well, Christ, the chief shepherd, he's feeding that inside group. He's helping them grow as a chief shepherd. those he's drawing into that center circle. Well, that that's where we see Christ with his mighty hands, healing, mending, caring for bringing the healing folks need from whatever they're coming from and whatever's happened to to to trust him or to to kind of get near that center. And those same hands that feed, and those same hands that heal, those mighty hands that were stretched out with power to save us from our sin, well, when they're on that outside edge, they're terrifying. Because he's on that outside edge for when Satan roars to give him a devastating blow. The hands that feed us are generous. The hands that heal us are powerful. The hands that protect us have the same power. That's how we're able to resist him, firm in our faith. We trust the power of Christ to feed us, to heal us, to save us, to destroy the works of the devil. There's a great theme throughout scripture, Christ the victor. We sing about it in our songbook. Let's get our songbook out. Turn to page seven. Hannah's song declares it, but let's just go to verse one of O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

Ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.

The whole idea of ransom and deliverance, redemption, that is Christ having victor over an enemy that is abusing and enslaving his people. We see it more explicit even in God rest you merry gentlemen. Second two lines of the first stanza.

Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day to save us all from Satan's power when we were gone astray.

We like the nativity scene and the picture of the shepherds and some animals and the angels rejoicing, but the one born is the serpent slayer. The one born comforts us, saves us, and heals us, but he's a warrior to finish the battle. Go to the next, the last stanza of God rest ye merry gentlemen.

Fear not then said the angels, let nothing you affright. This day is born a savior of a pure virgin bright to free all those who trust in him from Satan's power and might.

And the joy of the world, that third stanza,

no more the sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow as far as the curse is found.

That curse that was introduced to us when we trusted Satan instead of God. We grow firm in our faith by knowing Christ, our chief shepherd who heals us, feeds us, Protects us. We can go over to Genesis 3.15 where it was first promised to Satan,

you will strike the heel of my anointed, but he'll crush your head.

We see this next in Pharaoh who represents Satan. He hates God and his elect and opposes them and oppresses them. We can see it next in Goliath and the Philistines who hate God's people and are mighty and fearful, but God delivers. Psalm 2 talks about the nations raging against God. That's the type of Satan that's prowling, seeking to devour. But in the Christmas story, it's presented in a bizarre way. Where would Satan be presented in the birth of Christ? It's in Herod. That's bizarre because God's son is the son of David, the king of Israel, and Herod represents that king. He represents Satan who seeks to kill Jesus, who seeks to destroy, he actually destroys many young lives in an attempt to kill Jesus. And then on the flip side, you've got men of the East coming to worship the newborn King. As we just think about what this means, Christ the chief shepherd is mighty. He's mighty to heal you. He's mighty to help you in your anxiety. He's mighty to protect you from Satan as you stand firm in your faith. Lastly, we're hopeful. Hopeful. This is verses 10 and 11.

And after you've 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 the dominion forever and ever. Amen.

Hopeful. Well, at some level, there's hope right there in the first little stanza, right? Suffering a little while. There are folks who have been in suffering for a long time. Well, here Peter is declaring there is a time stamp on all suffering. For the elect exile, there is a timestamp. Suffering will end at some point. Some suffering feels like it goes on forever, and some suffering is for as long as we are here on this earth. But while we're suffering here for a little while, there is a temporary nature to suffering for the elect exiles. And while the suffering is temporary, notice what's eternal. The glory that we've been caught into. The glory that we receive from Christ. Again, what we believe about God is important to know how to actually accept these truths because the suffering is what brings anxiety and sometimes that suffering is so right here, it's hard to actually think ahead to the glory to come. That's why, again, we have five words this time, but I think they're probably easy to memorize. The God who cares for you is the God of all grace. Look at there in verse 10. What is his posture towards you? He cares for you, he sees you, he knows you, he's for you. Well, who is he? He's the God of all grace. He's not stingy. He's not keeping something on measure to make sure he gets poured out too much. The God of all grace He has called you. He's elected you. He's bought you with the precious blood of Christ. Even now in the midst of the temporary suffering, the God of all grace that cares for you, He's called you into eternal glory. So there's two hopes in terms of what we're experiencing. There's a hope that the suffering is going to end and there's hope of eternal glory to come. Go back to chapter one, verse three, he opened up with God who's great in mercy, full of grace. We cannot believe the lie that God has sent you. The fact that the father sent his only begotten son is the most significant demonstration of how full and generous and how stretched out his mighty arm can be. While we are suffering for a little while, the God of all grace has called you to eternal glory. That's what we're waiting on. And notice the confirmation of promise. He himself will restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. Now, those are all future promises. Those are all, they're going to finally be established. He will finally restore us. He will finally confirm us. He will finally strengthen us and establish us. But I believe we can also say he's restoring us, confirming us, strengthening us, and establishing us. We think about the doctrine of perseverance, it will come to the right end. And if we're trusting God in humility, it will end with receiving, being invited into the glory of Christ. And those who have the hope of that perseverance, we're enduring, knowing that God is the restorer, the confirmer, the one who strengthens us and establishes us. The future, there is a final completion. There is a final end, there is a final goal. And notice, salvation comes through Christ, the glory comes through Christ, the grace comes through Christ. The thing I want us to see in hopefulness is, He's called you to that eternal glory. He will restore us. He will confirm us. The God of all grace will strengthen us and establish us. All this to see, be of good courage, Christian. God who is mighty has given us new life. The God who cares helps us now by inviting us to cast our anxieties upon him. The God of all grace promises he will bring all this suffering to pass. And we know he is good in what he promises in suffering because of the suffering he's already presented us in Christ and what that has accomplished for us. So it comes to the only real response today and that is what Peter gives us in verse 11.

To him be the dominion forever and ever, amen.

The king has come. The king rules in righteousness at the right hand of the father. He has committed to shepherd and care for his people. We can trust His promises. We can take our anxieties up to the very presence and holiness of God in His name and prayer. And we can trust Him by humbling ourselves to follow Him. Christmas is a wonderful time to reflect upon the great God who has made promises. The promise was that He would send a son to save us. We get to now live on the side of, we're now waiting for that son to come back. to finish the work he's begun. As we end with this doxology, it's a praise to him whose kingdom is powerful. The prayer is our hearts will be lifted up to him as we consider his great care. The prayer is that our hearts are lifted up to him as we cast our anxieties off. prayers that our hearts learn to praise him as our glorious shepherd you pray with me father we thank you that you have made such great promises that we can now trace through the old testament and as christ taught us as your spirit taught us in your word, that we can see your great plan and how you brought it to a fruition in the birth of Christ and the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ. Lord, while we wait, we thank you that we're not waiting in a blindness. We don't have to figure out how to fix ourselves or help ourselves. Lord, you've given us your word to know how to stand firm in Christ, to be under him as our chief shepherd, to be built upon him as stones of the living stone. Lord, we praise you, we thank you for the new life you've given us. Select exiles. Lord, we pray for the grace to be humble. We pray for the grace to stand and resist as we're watchful. We pray you would help us to be hopeful, longing for the day of Christ's return. In his name we pray. Amen.