‘Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time:
Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you’. 1 Peter 5:6-7
God has been speaking to me recently because l am surprised by my struggles and part of the reason that I struggle so much is because I’m surprised when I do, it’s as if we set an expectation of Salvation that if we come to Jesus and lay our burdens at the foot of the Cross, that none of them will climb back in the car with us and go home.
But how many of you have ever laid your burdens down in church and found out that they follow you home with a few friends you never met before. It is like you come to Jesus to get rid of your struggles, but your struggles didn’t even start until you came to Jesus because before I came to Jesus if I wanted to curse you out, I just curse you out and I felt better, didn’t care how you felt or what God thought. I felt better and that’s all that mattered. But now I got this Holy Ghost on the inside of me and when I curse, it makes me feel bad about it and can’t sleep till l apologize.
Peter said everybody is struggling, everybody around the world is suffering, we have to take the two together. You can’t come to a cross for salvation where the Savior suffered for you and never expect to suffer in your desire to follow Him and be like Him. What makes you think you’re always going to be popular and liked?
So I pray that’s inspirational for you to know that you are supposed to suffer but it helps us because the enemy often operates in our lives in the secrecy and he is very sneaky. You think life is supposed to be easy because life looks easy for everyone else, but you don’t know, you have no idea, you don’t know and I don’t know your struggle, but I know that there are some struggles and some sufferings that comes with the package and so the call to follow Christ comes with a cross. Peter is like look, you want to be a part of this movement, the only way to really see the glory of God revealed is to suffer. Sometimes to suffer, to sit with your suffering and even with your sadness. Sometimes, it’s supposed to hurt, that’s the spiritual muscle fibers breaking down so they can grow back together stronger.
What surprises me Is knowing that we must suffer sometimes because our Savior suffered and let’s be honest, some of our suffering is not because of our Christian faith it is because of our poor decisions. It surprises me that with all the suffering that we already have to deal with, we somehow as a species invent new ways for ourselves to suffer and experience pain and call it progress. We invent communication devices that keep us constantly connected to everyone’s opinion.
The enemy is looking for someone to devour, we feed our minds with things that eat our peace alive and then we pray for God to give us peace after we open the front door and let the enemy show his face. I’m really praying that God would show us a strategy for this because it seems to me that some suffering is inevitable, but certain suffering like the suffering of our shame and the suffering of our sin that Jesus already paid for is dealt with and so wouldn’t it be unthinkable for us as God’s children to suffer under pressure that He never intended?
The interesting thing about 1 Peter 5:7, is that it preaches so well as a singular verse. I like to just lay it all at his feet but in the original language of the Bible and this is what God showed me a few years ago is that verse 7 was not a new sentence, it was a continuation of verse 6 and when you read it as a continuation it helps you to understand why sometimes we’re trying to cast our anxiety on God and they keep coming back like a boomerang with extra velocity because we are to skip to verse 7 which we want without verse 6, which we resist. Verse 6 starts by saying humble yourself.
Peter said ‘humble’ is a way of seeing the Hand of God in history that knows I’m just a small part of this. So, humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time He may exalt you.
