Who Cares? 1 Peter 5:6-7

Who Cares?

1 Peter 5:7 …casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.

Peter wanted his readers to know that they were going to face a terrible period of persecution.  They would face torture and imprisonment and death, because they were Christian believers.  Peter is telling them that in the midst of their terrible troubles, God cares for them.  In the passage we are reading today, 1 Peter 5:6-7 Peter quotes Psalm 55, and tells us what to do, and why we should do it, and what the results will be!

1 The God who Cares.  Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, 7 casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.

Now, verse 6 & 7 is what we call a couplet, the two statements being together, and can’t be separated.  So, what does it mean to say that God cares for us?  Think for a moment about:

• The source of God’s care.  We learn here that God’s care for us is a consequence of his nature, – his characteristics.
  • His OMNIPOTENCE.  He has a mighty hand!  His hand is described as ‘MIGHTY.’  Thinking asbout the omnipotent hand of God should make us humble and submissive to him in all that he brings upon us.  James. 4:7, 10.
  • His LOVE.  He WANTS to lift us up!  He wants to exalt us!
• The operation of God’s care.
  • He cares for us in that he created us.  The earth was created by the direct action of God.  The very first verse of the Bible says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).  God made us, and he made us to be his, and to have eternal fellowship with Him.  He put within each of us a desire to know Him. Every one of us has a thirst that can only be quenched through a personal relationship with God.  He cared enough to create us. 
  • He cares for us in that he redeemed us.  This is the most wonderful aspect of God’s care.  He sent his only Son to be our Saviour, to redeem us from our sin when we are in utter rebellion against him.   And with that greatest gift of all, think of all that he has given us in Christ….    Romans 8:32. he cared enough to redeem us from the curse.
  • He cares for us in that he provides for us.  We have already reminded ourselves, just a couple of weeks ago, of the words of Jesus regarding worry.  Matthew 6:30

We have a God who cares for each one of us.    We are under God’s HAND!  We surrender to God’s will and purpose, for it is always perfect.  For some of us that may be about learning Christian contentment in work, in the family, in respect of our home, our lifestyle; and for these poor persecuted believers, and for others in more modern times, surrender to his will can be a painful experience indeed.  Yet there is another aspect to this… 

2 What To Do When Trouble Comes.   Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, 7 casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you. 

Can you see that in times of trouble Peter tells us to do two simple things… 

• Get a Proper Perspective on Your Life.   There will be people who will want us to believe that ‘I am in charge of my own life, – my fate is in my hands, but Peter reminds us here that our circumstances in life come from GOD’S MIGHTY HAND!  It’s best for us to recognise that we are NOT God, that we are not in control, that the mighty Hand of God guides our fate and our future.  And our self humiliation leads to our future exaltation by Him.  Humility is ultimately rewarded. that He may exalt you in due time.    How can we be exalted in due time, if we have already exalted ourselves? In Luke 18, at the end of the story about the two men who went to the synagogue to pray Jesus explains,  for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself [forsaking self-righteous pride] will be exalted.” V18,   
• Throw all your burdens away!   There’s no-one going to care for these believers.  No-one cares, they are all too busy with their own important lives.  Today, Christianity is the most persecuted faith in the world, yet who cares?  No one seems to care.  BUT God cares, and the Christian can cast all of his/her burden upon the Lord!  So throw all those burdens away, cast them upon the Lord!

So, in times of trouble, when feel that no-one cares, let us be humble enough to admit we are not as important or as ‘in control’ as we think we are, let us be patient enough to await the Lord’s good timing, knowing that a day will come when we will be lifted up, and let us be trueing enough to give him our burdens, knowing that he will carry them for us. 

3 The Result of Our Obedience in This. 

When we humble ourselves before the Lord, and cast our troubles upon Him, there WILL be consequences that are both eternal and temporal, for this life and for the life to come.  We will be… 

• Exalted by God in eternity.  There may well be a time on this earth when our troubles will cease, or at least be alleviated.  Even the Lockdown must end sometime! The Lord often does lift our burdens in this life, but how much greater will be the day when we reach our heavenly home, and meet our saviour face to face!  Only then will we be truly lifted up from the crds and worries of this world, and the tears and the sickness and the parting will be no more.   
• Sustained in this life.   And even if the Lockdown continues for another couple of years, the Lord will certainly sustain us. He will keep us going, he will go with our troubles with us, and he will keep us in his care.  Matt. 6:25; Ps. 84:11; Rom. 8:28. Because of this one commentator remarked that whatever trouble this life brings us, ‘Life will never break us, it will make us!’ 

SO GOD CARES, and we can cast our cares, our worries and our burdens upon the Lord, knowing that he will sustain us, for he cares for us.  BUT WAIT!  Don’t think that this verse is only for those who are being persecuted, or in dire straits.  We are to cast ALL of our cares upon the Lord.  Even the very smallest and least insignificant of our worries can be shared with him.  Personal cares, family cares, cares for the present, cares for the future, cares for themselves, for others, and for the church.    ‘…casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.’

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