Today we come upon one of my favorite pairs of verses, 1 Peter 5:6-7:

6 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.

I love this verse because it reminds me that I am to take my struggles, I am to take my pain, I am to take the hurt I feel, everything I am feeling that is pain-related and I am to send that God’s way...I am to push that up to Him and struggle with Him; He is the only one who can fully take it in stride and to whom is was designed to go anyways...and it reminds me that He loves me, He is there for me, He will comfort me when I do that...and that is what He desires.  Frustrated with my work - take that to God.  Frustrated with the relationship with my wife, or my with my kids...take that to God.  Frustrated with my life in general, and my repeated struggles with sin and shame - take that to God.  That is humility...taking it and laying at God’s feet and admitting, I would even add ‘out loud’, and leaving it for God to work on.  And we do this because (a) God is really the only one who can ultimately do anything about it, and (b) because God cares for us and desires this from us.  That is a part of having relationship with God.  I love this invitation from Peter.

And then one of the greatest encouragements and reminders of God’s presence as Peter goes on in the next few verses, in 1 Peter 5:8-10:

8 Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. 9 Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. 10 And after you have 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.

It is the reminder that the devil is lurking and looking for a victim, and one little crack or one little stumble and he will insert himself into our lives.  We can’t ever think we’ve won the battle...the struggle with temptation and with sin is a perpetual struggle in this life, and we have to accept the reality that it never ends.  Otherwise, we get complacent.  I am fairly certain that with the exception of people leaving the church because the church didn’t love them and appreciate them and made them feel judged, the number one reason people jettison their faith is just fatigue...it is that they are worn out trying to live rightly.  It is easier to live how we want and to just live for momentary happiness...at least for a while.  That’s one of the devil’s greatest tricks...living for ourselves rather than God is typically ‘in the moment’ just easier.  But, this goes back to that hard-easy principle we’ve discussed several times...when we do what’s hard in the moment, life eventually starts getting easier.  When we do what’s easy in the moment, life eventually starts getting harder.  We are going to experience hard and easy, and we get to choose the order in which we experience them...it is an interesting thing to realize and to appreciate about life.

Great message to close our 1 Peter this morning.  Tomorrow is the background on 2 Peter, then the read through, and then we’ll dive in as always.