Closing Words (Part A)

How many professed believers are resisted by God and don't know it because they're too proud and self-centered to admit that they're doing wrong? And they're wondering why God's not blessing their life or their work or how come God's not sending people to them to share Christ with? Refusing to blame themselves for the lack of blessings in their life, spiritual blessings I'm talking about, not material blessing.

You get material blessings without Jesus Christ. Please turn to 1 Peter 5. 1 Peter 5, we will read verses 5 through 14. Likewise, you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you, be submissive to one another and be clothed with humility for God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. Therefore, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God that he may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon him for he cares for you. Be sober, be vigilant because your adversary, the devil walks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Resist him steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world. But may the God of all grace who called us to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen and settle you. To him be glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen. By Sylvanus, our faithful brother, as I consider him, I have written to you briefly exhorting and testifying that this is the true grace of God in which you stand. She who is in Babylon, elect together with you, greets you and so does Mark, my son. Greet one another with a kiss of love. Peace to you all who are in Christ Jesus.

Amen. It's quite beautiful. We're reading it.

It's quite a pleasure to read it. I know many of you moms read aloud to your children. It's a very good practice and hopefully you yourself as you read scripture to them out loud, you are blessed and ministered to. These are closing words of Peter, having encouraged in the first part of this fifth chapter the pastors to be pastors, mindful that they are under the great and chief shepherd, the Lord Jesus, and that their reward is coming. And then he moves right into, likewise you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you be submissive to one another. I'm reading from verse five. Be clothed with humility for God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. The solution to youthful error, which will offer up many solutions is indeed submission. Some Christians seem to live to make ministry difficult for others.

That's not submission. So he says likewise you younger people submit yourselves to your elders. Now elders here is expanded.

In the earlier part of this chapter, the elders were restricted to the pastors. But here he's expanding it a little bit to include all spiritual authority, not senior citizens per se. We function poorly otherwise as a church, as a home, as any unit, any organization where there is no submission. There is struggle.

There's conflict. It's a fundamental attitude. It's found throughout scripture. It's not hard to find in scripture. Jesus, we know when he was in the upper room, heading toward the cross. John 13.

After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples feet and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. This is the Lord of the universe kneeling down, washing the feet of his disciples, giving us an example of what service involves. Sometimes it's easy to serve. Sometimes it's very difficult. Sometimes it's easy to be submitted. Sometimes it is very difficult. But it is our principle that holds us, what we believe and why we're doing it.

That is the motivation. Without submission to God, there can be no mission for God, not effective. Insubordination was something that characterized Israel's first king, King Saul. He was insubordinate to God. He did not obey.

He did not submit. One must be committed to be submitted, committed to what they believe, knowing that it is not a waste when it often appears to be. And yet, leaders themselves have a responsibility not to be abusive or incompetent. To effectively lead, you have to win people to some degree. Some are unwinnable, some are winnable for a season or so. But authority to abuse it, it is an abyss.

It is a pit to be under the leadership of someone who just shouldn't be there. And may we be very sensitive to these things because they are about people. That's what this is about. Not submitted to a wooden fence. It's to the systems that God has before us. One of the great examples of submission is found in the story of King David leaving Jerusalem because of course his insubordinate son Absalom is after him. And there is this one warrior, Ittai, who is likely not even a Jew.

Not by birth. And it's picked up in 2 Samuel, but Ittai answered the king and said, now this is when David said, what are you doing? This is not your fight. You stay here in Jerusalem.

And Ittai responds, as Yahweh lives, and as my lord the king lives, surely in whatever place my lord the king shall be, whether in death or life, even there, also your servant will be. I have got your back. I love you.

I am with you. What a picture of submission. But David won that in spite of David's faults. There's much more to the man than his faults. And Jesus doesn't let us lose sight of that in the scriptures. Peter says, yes, all of you be submissive to one another. That means work together for each other's interests in the Lord. Some get this without even trying, effortlessly.

They just arrive there. Others, he's pushing them up a hill. Others don't seem to try, and therefore they never get it. And this is the thing about Christianity, when it comes to the precepts, the rules of how we are supposed to behave, you have to practice it to develop it. If you don't have it, you have to go get it. And once you start going to get it, you've got to work it. Jesus said this, but go learn what this means.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice. You catch that? Go learn what this means. This was to those who thought they knew everything. And so he, our Lord, understood, of course, but now we understand that he understands that there are just some things about the faith that don't come easy to us, and we have to develop them as a craftsman.

Any of you ever try to cut a straight line with an acetylene torch? No one gets that route to starting gate. It takes a long time to develop that kind of skill. But if you don't work it, you won't get it. You don't need another profound saying on humility. We need to learn what it means by doing it. I have never needed to try to be humble so much in my life until I became a pastor.

Well, because then I would say, okay, sure, bozo. But now it's a whole other game. The Lord is there, and it's his people, and I've been taken to the woodshed, and learning to just let it stick with the Lord.

Let him take care of it. So he says, as a consequence, God resists the proud. James adds, but gives grace to the humble. So there is a consequence or a reward.

It's up to the individual. How many professed believers are resisted by God and don't know it because they're too proud and self-centered to admit that they're doing wrong, and they're wondering why God's not blessing their life or their work, or how come God's not sending people to them to share Christ with, refusing to blame themselves for the lack of blessings in their life, spiritual blessings I'm talking about, not material blessing. You get material blessings without Jesus Christ. The world proves that to us. Stubborn pride.

It is not resolve. It is stubborn, and it is self-serving. It's not always easy to point out, but sometimes it's very easy to point out. In verse 6, he continues, therefore, because of all these things, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time. Now, remember, he's saying these things to Christians that are being persecuted by their government, physically persecuted. And as I've been saying through this study, it's escalating.

It has not yet peaked. It will get worse. Therefore, humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God. That will help us avoid God siding against us and resisting us. If you are self-important, Jesus gave a parable. He said, if you're self-important, you're setting yourself up to be embarrassed and shamed by those who are more honorable than you. So he told the parable about the person that goes to the wedding and sits right up front in the best seats.

And then the host comes along and says, excuse me, can you move to the back? This is reserved for someone more honorable. And so the parable, of course, is to cause us to pay attention to how we behave and how we think of ourselves. The sinful heart has a surplus, here it comes, of self-esteem.

Back in the 80s and 90s, this false teaching infiltrated the church. So many church leaders are writing books on self-esteem. Self-esteem is not our problem. We have a surplus of self-esteem. The opposite of self-esteem is God-esteem under self-control. It's not self-hatred, but to esteem oneself. John the Baptist said, Jesus must increase, I must decrease. He had a wonderful opportunity to say, esteem myself. They say, well, that's not what it means. Oh, no. That's why we don't hear too much of it today.

It failed. Have you noticed how many books are not being written on self-esteem as they were in the 80s and 90s? Because they began to realize that people having too high an opinion of themselves are a menace to others. This is illustrated for us in Isaiah. We're Satan. We have that siliquia, that speech of Satan, I will be like the most high. I will exalt my throne.

I, me, I. And we listen to his language there in Isaiah 14, and we say, Lord, may I not, may I not conduct myself that way. And so humility is to just be conscious of who you are, your shortcomings, even your strengths. We all have strengths, incidentally. Not to show off or to bully.

It's, again, I ask this question from time to time. Where else are you going to hear these things? But within the confines of Christian teachings, this is what God is looking for. We don't have to puff ourselves up. We don't have to promote ourselves. We don't, we don't have to think more, we already think highly of ourselves.

It's just veiled in many sophisticated ways sometimes because of our frustrations. And so with all scripture that has to say about this, I'm surprised that it ever took hold. But anyway, many of you, I'm sure, follow that because you want to submit to your leaders, and the Christian leaders are teaching us things. We want to follow and get it right. The problem arises is when we're not very versed on the scripture, and it's a process, not trying to be too hard or too light. That would undo everything I just said. He says that he may exalt you in due time.

There it is. God will lift you up. God will give us what we need. I mean, how does a person say, I feel a calling to the ministry knowing they are completely inadequate, ill-equipped, not qualified, regardless of how much edumocation they may think they have.

I know it's education. I should say that because it's probably someone that, anyway, that he may exalt you. So I can speak for myself coming into ministry. I'm just trusting God to fill in the blanks, to help out. And he has, sometimes not fast enough.

Sometimes he's let me fall flat on my face, at least in my perception, my thinking, so that he can get to problems. You said that too harshly. No one cares about your opinion on that. Yeah, I mean, this is my trip home. When you leave the sermon here, I know you're going, that was the best sermon ever.

You'd have to go to the Sermon on the Mount to beat that one. Me, I'm going, you idiot. I can't believe you said that. Okay, maybe you can clean it up next week.

No, that would be petty. And he's so, that's welcome to my world. Why are you so quiet? So, in due time he may exalt you. In due time, God will take care of these things.

Humility accepts the truth about ourselves. Not an easy place to get to. I'm in my position, okay? I'm not eloquent. What are you going to do then?

Well, search for what I have instead and just use that. And that is for all of us. In verse 7, he says, casting all your care on him, for he cares for you. Again, persecuted Christians, he's writing to.

He's fully aware. As I've been reading this, and this will come up towards the end of this letter, as I've been reading through 1 Peter this session, I get the feeling Peter's not in the trouble zone. He's not in the hot zone where he's getting the persecution yet. And this in no way disqualifies him from addressing it because he has been persecuted already and he knows his life will end violently through persecution. And so when he says, cast your care upon him, he knows that there are those that are hurting the people of God, that hate the people of God.

Now here we are in a relatively peaceful environment. We are surrounded by mostly Jesus lovers. But outside these walls, there are many people that hate that you love Christ.

They hate what he stands for. They don't mind letting you know this. And this is something that is to stir us to be concerned about lost souls. That our testimony would be good enough, doesn't have to be perfect, we have to try to make it perfect, good enough to draw people to us. I mentioned earlier leaders, good leaders, I think they stir a desire to follow them. I know when I find a man, speaking of my, I think back in my military days, I can remember the men that I admired and did not mind their orders, what they wanted to do. In fact, if they were going along, I was jolly about the whole thing.

This is a good thing. It is something that we also want to use in preaching the gospel, where people want to hear from us. They want our opinion on a particular matter, whether it is political or domestic or spiritual, or to us everything is spiritual of course. And so we tend to cast some of our cares on Christ.

I know I do. I try to cast them all. This Greek word for cast, it is the same Greek word, only found one other place in the New Testament by the writers of the New Testament who wrote in Greek. It is when Jesus, they put their clothes on the donkey for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem on what we know as Palm Sunday. They cast their clothes onto the donkey. And so you're saddling Jesus with your problems.

That's a picture that comes out of this. And so when you cast your cares on him, you give it to him. And the word for casting your care is anxiety. The translators could have used that word anxiety here. They did in Philippians chapter 4 where Paul says, be anxious for nothing in the New King James. That same word anxious translated there in Philippians is the word used here for your care. Your anxieties, the things that spook you. And there's no shortage of them.

This in fact, the line goes around the corner, does it not? Give them to Christ. Let him. You fight your own battles, you can give them to God. And that does not mean that you will be ejected from your problem. These Christians, as I mentioned, will suffer escalating persecution. But the words that were written to them are no less true, accurate, and necessary. So may I never, may I never have self courage enough to try to overcome my problems without Jesus Christ or contrary to Jesus Christ. We matter to God, even if we are being persecuted. Now there's a warning that goes with this beautiful verse, casting all your care for he cares for you. I know as a Christian, a young Christian, I used to write verses down that I wanted to memorize on index cards.

And this of course was one of them. But we cannot walk according to the course of this world and claim such promises. You get that. You cannot, God used something extreme and a little absurd. You cannot be actively robbing banks and while you're doing that saying, I'm casting all my care on the Lord because he cares for me.

You cannot claim that promise. So that leaves you and I to fill in the blanks. Is there any course of this world that we're not getting out in the open before the Lord? Yeah, I mean, you know, we struggle with things but we take it to them.

Lord, you know I have this problem and I hate it and you hate it and I'm working as hard as I can and just please help. Well, that person can cast all their cares on the Lord. But the one who is ignoring what they're doing and they know it's wrong and still want to come claim Christ, yeah, you got an issue there.

Well, let's get back to some of the teaching part of this as I've been giving application, I hope. In verse 7, we have what the good shepherd does. He cares for us.

We cast our care upon him. In verse 8, we have what the enemy does. In verse 9, we have what the disciples do. And then in verse 10, we have what God will do.

And that's something that Peter arrived at without even trying. You see, when you do a book, you outline, you think it through. But when you do a letter, we tend to just let it flow. Sometimes we may sketch a little. First, I'm going to do this.

I'm going to hit that. This is a letter that he is dictating to Silvanus, the amendsaurus of the letter. The one writing the letter.

I told you about that eloquent stuff. And so here he is just speaking it, just saying it. He might be pacing back and forth. He might be lying on a cot. He might be having a yo-yo in his hand, just bellowing it out.

Not likely. And so I think the reason why I point that out is because scholars come along and they find, they discover these. Look at that. God is speaking in verse 7. The enemy is doing in verse 8.

Then it is genius. Well, who is the author and finisher of our faith? Who is the author of these things in the scripture of the Holy Spirit? Be sober. Be vigilant.

Because your adversary, the devil, walks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. Be sober. Or be something else. What is, if you're not sober, then what are you? It doesn't take a very intelligent person to figure that one out. We all know the answer to that. The enemy is going to be sober in his attacks on you.

We better be sober in response. Otherwise we're destabilized. And he will take advantage of that when we get to the second letter of Peter and he deals with these false teachers in the church. We'll find that they take advantage of destabilized Christians. They make merchandise of them. They exploit them.

They gobble them up. A professed believer who has not matured over time becomes a delicacy for forces that are harmful spiritually, if not to them, through them. We don't want to be that person. So he says be vigilant. Stay awake. That's the Greek word. That's the meaning.

Stay awake. We're so glad you tuned in today to study the book of 1 Peter on Cross Reference Radio. Cross Reference Radio is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. And we're blessed to bring you God's word with each broadcast. If you'd like more information about this program or want to listen to additional teachings from Pastor Rick, please visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never have to miss a program. Just search for Cross Reference Radio in iTunes, Google Play Music or your favorite podcast app. We hope you'll tune in again next time to join us as we continue our study through the scriptures right here on Cross Reference Radio.