(1 Peter 5:6 ESV) Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, (7) casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.
Pride breeds insecurity breeds anxiety. We trust ourselves more than we trust God and that is a scary scenario. That is not our stated position but our lived position.
We just love to pull little feel good, encouraging verses out of the Holy Book and make our worlds or someone else’s a little better. This is one problem with memorizing Bible verses. It becomes much easier for our meaning to override God’s intended meaning.
We arrogantly sprinkle the words of God like fairy dust to “encourage” someone, regardless of the fact that God may not even have said or meant the potion we cooked up for our spiritual ambiance.
“Just cast all you cares on God, brother.” Sprinkle, sprinkle. Oh my, I made them feel better. How good I am.
But, honey, maybe brother can’t cast his cares on God because he hasn’t humbled himself before God, and if he hasn’t humbled himself before God, he doesn’t know how big God is because you don’t see a big God from a position of pride.
“Humble. . .casting.”
Don’t be yanking verse 7 away from the context of a God who we must bow before and acknowledge his mighty hand and his perfect sense of timing. Read the text.
Of course, we really need to go back one more verse because of the “therefore” in verse 6. The way stated here that we humble ourselves before God is that we first humble ourselves before one another.
How can we trust God with what worries us if we do not trust God with our lives. This becomes our issue. Will I trust God to take care of me when I let down my guard as I put on the clothes of humility and vulnerability, and take off the clothes of pride and self-protection.
Is God my refuge and strength or not?
If I can’t trust God with what he says matters, then how can I trust God with what I think matters?
We don’t learn God’s care by memorizing a verse or making it into a poster. We learn God’s care by trusting him with our lives, even if that means we expose ourselves to something very dangerous — the people around us.
