Submission to God

Uh like Justin said, um Melissa and I, my wife, um we've got three kids.

We've been coming to Missio for a long time and have been at Sacred Mission since the start, and um just have had great joy in serving as mission group leaders and kids leaders over the year.

Um we've had a a little bit of a crazy week this week uh as I was preparing for for this.

I you know every week's different when you prepare for sermons.

Um this one was a little up and down in the sense of things that happened and interruptions and um between car troubles and dog troubles and the joy of getting back together with our mission group, which was awesome.

Uh we got together as a full mission group for the first time in man, at this point, I think it was February or March was the last time we were all together.

We've all been together in smaller groups, but um that was a joy uh to do that, and it's been a joy to just be able to dig into First Peter, to dig into the end of his letter um this week and to draw near to the Lord through it.

So I'm really grateful for the opportunity and really grateful to uh be able to be here this morning with you all closing out this series.

Um and I don't know about you all, it's been a really encouraging series for me, um, just so relatable to the times and what we have going on and all the things we're seeing in our culture and our world.

And I'm hoping uh that this morning is an encouragement to all of us of how Peter kind of rounds out his letter as we saw in the the words that Justin just read.

And so uh I know Justin already prayed, but let me let me pray as well to get us started here, and then we will dig in.

Let's pray.

Father, we are grateful for another opportunity to be together, um, just worshiping you, just giving you glory and praise for the work you're doing in our lives, for the great work of the gospel and the truth that it gives us uh every day, every moment of our life.

I pray, Holy Spirit, as we get together this morning that you would be present here, that you would work in the hearts of all of us to sharpen us, to focus us on what you have for us in this word, and to just encourage us to cling fast and hard to your truths and the hope that you give us in the gospel and then these words this morning.

I pray, God, that you would just use me for your glory, um, that uh the words that are spoken this morning um are less mine and more yours, and that we would just cling hard to these gospel truths that are so evident in this passage.

We love you, we thank you, uh, we humble ourselves before you this morning.

In Christ's name, amen.

Alright, so um as Justin said, when we kind of pivoted into 1 Peter, I know for me, um, I hadn't been in 1 Peter in a while, and as we started getting into it and kind of running week to week with all the live streams and the sermons, just so many relatable themes in this letter from Peter that just I think are relatable all the time.

They're relatable to us even outside of a global pandemic and everything else around the world that's been crazy and going on, um, but all the more relatable with everything that's been going on lately.

And so uh I wanted to talk a little bit, uh and I won't spend a ton of time on this, but in the five chapters of 1 Peter, uh, some of the major themes that we've covered are themes like separation, things like suffering, which again, suffering, I think especially is one that we can really relate to right now, and seeing all the suffering around the world, not just with the pandemic, but everything that's going on.

Uh persecution, glory, uh the glory of God that that comes through the work and his children, um, the hope of the gospel that's so prevalent in this book that is so prevalent in today's passage, and then uh themes like courage, themes like humility and grace.

And the themes of humility we've seen a lot over the last couple weeks.

And that's kind of where Peter lands in his letter this morning, and we'll see that.

And last week, uh Pastor Justin in the first part of chapter five focused a lot on the elders and the responsibility of the elders to shepherd, and to shepherd the flock that they are entrusted with, um the way that they should shepherd, and how the flock and we as people in the church should submit to elders.

And there was a lot of themes of humility and humbling ourselves there.

And this week a lot of those themes continue.

We see as Paul, or not Paul, this is Peter, sorry, I've been reading a lot from Paul lately, as you see Peter transition into the latter part of the letter to close things out for those he's writing this letter to, we continue to see that theme of humbling ourselves, but the context of how he talks about humbling ourselves changes a bit.

So I'm just gonna run through, I know we already read the passage, I'm not gonna read the entire passage again, but I want to run through verse by verse to just get us in a place where we can be centered on kind of the flow of the passage and what Peter is saying so that we can set ourselves up for what for more of what we're gonna talk about, how this applies to us this morning.

So, in the theme of humility, in verse 6, when Peter talks about humbling ourselves, the context changes in the sense of he's he's not just talking about humility, but he becomes direct to the source of where our humility should lie.

And we see a little bit, I'll go back to the last verse before our passage this morning, when he says, he ends the last sentence before verse 6.

So in verse 5, when he says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

And then he gives us more context of how we are to humble ourselves.

Not just humble ourselves to make ourselves lowly in front of other people, but to humble ourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God.

So we see this theme of the action of humbling ourselves before God Almighty, his will, his ways, his truth, and through it at the proper time he will exalt us.

The proper time being his timing.

So we continue to see that theme of humility.

And then in verse 7, as we continue forward, this is another, I think, super relatable just topic in general.

Um, and and again, not, and we'll talk about this in a little bit more here to come, but not only this morning, and not only in a global pan world of a global pandemic and civil unrest and everything else going on, but in our day-to-day lives, anxiety is something I think that works its ways and way into most of our lives.

Fear, anxiety, worry.

And so Peter continues, and he's talked about that a little bit before in this letter, but he talks about in verse 7 the submission of our fear of fear and anxiety and handing that over to God.

And even on our best days, I think all of us probably experience at least a little bit of anxiety.

Whether that's your job, whether it's relationships, uh, whether it's the global pandemic, whether it's Taco Bell taking items off their menu because of the global pandemic.

I don't know if you've heard about that.

I'll touch on that later.

That's scary times we live in.

Um but I think we can all relate to that anxiety.

And as we jump into verse 8 and 9, Peter pivots from focusing on humbling ourselves before God to reminding us of the real threat that we live with day to day.

He calls for the people he's writing this to to be sober-minded and watchful for our adversary, the devil.

And we're gonna talk quite a bit about this this morning, but it's a stark reminder that there is an enemy.

He is real, and we need to take an active role in guarding against him.

And we can't be passive in that fight.

As we jump through into verse 10 and 11, we continue to see uh again, we see Peter bring up this theme of suffering.

We see that Peter talks about how we all will suffer.

Um, that it's suffering that's not unique to us, that others around the world have experienced similar suffering, that we will suffer, that we are not alone, but God is faithful in that suffering.

He is always faithful, and we can have hope in our suffering.

And then as we get towards the end of this passage, we see Peter wrap up and that final call to action to stand firm.

And what a call that is, and we'll talk more about that as well.

So I know that was kind of like a crash course on this passage, but I wanted to kind of walk through those themes to lay the groundwork for how we are going to progress this morning and talk about uh how this applies to us and how Peter is packing, really packing it in in this final section.

And I think it's easy for us to see it and read it and kind of give it an amen and say, Yeah, I believe all those things.

Those are all good things.

But really, maybe not feel as convicted to take action or not really understand where we go with this passage in terms of what action we should take.

And so we're gonna talk about this morning how it applies to us.

We're gonna talk about how we can take these encouraging truths, like words just absolutely stacked with truths and gospel truths, and apply that to our lives.

And so that leads us to our main idea this morning.

And this is kind of my attempt to take this jam-packed passage and uh to hopefully bring it all into a night, nice little uh tidy main idea here, and hopefully to help wrap up this sermon series and this study of this letter from Peter.

And here's our main idea this morning.

Although we are suffering and our adversary threatens, in Christ we have a hope that cannot be shaken, and we can count on him to restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish us.

So, like I said, Peter says it loud and clear, we all suffer, but do we but we need to ask ourselves, are we suffering with the hope of Christ in our hearts?

Are we suffering well by not putting our hope in overcoming the suffering, but putting our hope in the eternal truth of the gospel and what Jesus has accomplished for us?

Do we believe that he is faithful?

Do we believe that in the midst of whether we're we're you know successfully and fruitfully suffering or we're really struggling with the suffering, do we believe that he is faithful to restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish us?

And not only that, do we believe in his timing?

Do we believe that he'll not only exalt us if we humble ourselves before him, but do it in a proper time, his proper time, not necessarily the proper time that we think is right, which is oftentimes, at least from my experience, doesn't seem to always match up my own timing with what God has for me.

And I think, frankly, I think we express a lot of doubt.

We express in it whether that is verbally or we are explicit with our doubt, I think it's less often that, and more that the way we act and the way we behave expresses doubt to these truths that Peter has for us this morning.

And so I want to get into talking about how we express that doubt and what our story is and how we react to this, or maybe it's not even a reaction to this, but it's just and and I think we've seen a lot of this in the times we've had over the last few months.

Um, but this these truths and and these observations I think apply across the board to all of us at all times.

And so the first way I think we express unbelief has to do with humility, and I think it's this I think most of us display, we display a self-righteous humility or we lack lack it altogether.

So we lack humility altogether.

So our culture is pretty nuts right now.

I think we can all agree with that.

Um it has seemed to kind of ebb and flow.

You know, I I don't know about you all, but there are days when I'm like, ah, everything kind of feels normal.

Like when I'm at King's Island riding roller coasters, minus the mask, when it's 95 degrees, um, and it possibly flying off my face.

Fun fact, Melissa actually was riding Diamondback uh last week, and um right at the the bank where you go to the picture, her mask flew off, and she bit it with her mouth as it was flying off.

So in the picture you see her like this with her mask in her teeth.

And so that alone was worth her wearing a mask on the roller coaster.

That was uh that was entertaining.

But moments like that feel pretty normal.

Uh, but there are still a lot of moments, whether it's observing the culture through the media, observing culture as we go out, you know, just go shopping, do our normal daily routine where things don't feel normal.

And you take the the high emotion of all of it, and our strong emotions, and you take the way our culture is right now, and you kind of swirl all that together, and out of it typically comes typically comes a lot of strong opinions from a lot of people.

And whether it's in person and relationships and conversation, which often more often than not, I think it's not, um, or it's online, or it's in an article, or elsewhere, our opinions and how we deliver those very often lack humility.

Whether it's from our leaders, our neighbors, our family, our friends, ourselves, we are so quick to throw opinions out at other people and direct it to other people without any humility coming along with it.

Think about it.

When was the last time you were scrolling through your Facebook feed or Instagram or Twitter or I don't even know all the all the channels now?

Um and you saw a post and you're like, or even the majority of posts, you're like, man, there's a lot of humility behind that statement.

That guy or girl really humbled themselves before the mighty hand of God before they posted that that just total rip on society or people or a people group or uh an issue or whatever it is.

It's rare.

And you know, there's probably some, and praise God for those posts.

And I and I in no way am saying that we should not have opinions and we shouldn't express those opinions.

I just think a healthy dose of humility and a healthy dose of stopping and humbling ourselves would go a long way.

And for those of us who are in Christ, we do have an authoritative and righteous message that we should share.

And but the the real source of that should not be our opinion, it should not be just what we think.

And sometimes, and I know it is sometimes hard to walk this life in following Christ and to delineate between what are our opinions and what's truth because they blur a lot of times.

But we we do have a source of truth, and we do have something to cling to to help us stay on the right track instead of always pressing our own agenda and checking our intentions and our motivations before we fire something off or share an opinion.

And that cycle or that flow of observing something, immediately reacting to something, and then just firing away a response or an opinion or some kind of words spoken into or actions spoken in that speak into it, is just absolutely perpetuated and accelerated by these little devices.

And I I talk to Melissa all the time, it's funny, um, and and this might not be a unique metaphor, but she, you know, she'll get frustrated like we all do.

I think we've all also been scrolling through our feeds, and you're like, man, like I'm so tired of all of these opinions or all of this negativity or all of this stuff that's coming.

And I've said to her on several occasions, I was like, all of those people that you've seen giving those opinions, if they were all standing in a gymnasium, each in their own little section of the gymnasium, just screaming out their opinions, would you walk into that room and listen to that?

Like, would you willfully take steps into that room and try to hear all of that, whether it's on a one-by-one basis or all at the same time?

She's like, Well, no.

I'm like, yeah, in essence, that's what we're doing.

And so we need to also realize, like, as consumers of that, I think it's important to be intentional and humble ourselves as well.

Um, but we are also the ones in the room screaming oftentimes.

So I think we need to be careful about that.

The next way I think we uh we express unbelief has to do with anxiety, and it's that we try to overpower our fear and our anxiety.

I I said it already.

Listen, we we already live in a heightened time of anxiety before everything hit um with COVID-19 and with all the civil unrest, and um there's all kinds of other stuff.

That I said Taco Bell, that was a joke, but there's also stuff in the news right now about bubonic plague.

I don't know if you've heard that.

We won't even go there.

Um, and I don't mean to panic anybody, to be clear, someone did get bubonic plague.

He also ate a rodent.

So don't eat rodents.

Don't yeah, don't eat marmots.

That's a good thing to live by.

Um, there's not even marmots here, but generally speaking, if you catch a mouse in your garage, don't maybe don't put it on a skewer and kebab it or anything like that.

Um but yeah, there's just a lot going on in a heightened state of anxiety, and 2020 has taken it to a whole new level, and stuff just continues to seem to pop up.

And uh if you know, there's a quote about this, it has a lot to do with the media and a lot to do with the devices we carry around.

But um Max Ducato, he's a he's a pastor in Texas, he writes a lot of books.

Um he has a book about anxiety that I read several years ago, and I remember him talking about this, so I was just looking it up, and he has a quote that says it talks about like where we've come as a culture in terms of how we feed that anxiety.

And he says this, and our parents' day the nightly news can communicated the catastrophe.

Now it's a matter of minutes.

We've barely processed one crisis, and then we hear about another.

And that is so telling of our time right now.

I feel like that's just perfectly reflective of like, oh, COVID-19, man, that's bad enough.

And then all the new news that would come out with that, right?

All the data that would come, all the restrictions that would come, and then we start to ease out of it.

And as soon as we get to a peak of feeling like things are normal, there's a new update on a new crisis.

And I think it's really easy for us to try to take control of that, whether that control looks like picking up our devices and trying to get more information and saying, if only if I know more, if I have more info, I can better control the anxiety and reaffirm things that I hope are true and overcome this.

Whether it's big or small, we think we can fix it.

We have this idea that we can fix it.

And I'm a bit of a control freak, so I'm terrible at this.

And praise God for a wife that helps keep me accountable on it.

But we make battles that are not our battles, ours to fight.

Whether it's big or small.

And in general, I think a lot of times there's no real consideration about handing it over to God and submitting it to God, whether it's a small worry, a big worry, um, something that's utterly consuming us.

And I think a lot of that's because it doesn't feel practical.

I've been told, I can tell you right now, like I I've been to counseling about anxiety, I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people, and it's not generally helpful when you're feeling really anxious and fearful to somebody to be like, you know what?

Hand that over to God.

You're like, hmm.

But I don't I don't have a how do I do that?

Like, what's the practicality of me just being like, here you go, God, now I'm happy, I'm just gonna go on my way.

So I think the perception is oftentimes that's not practical.

And I think honestly.

A lot of times we don't even think about it.

When we're in the fight of fighting anxiety and trying to control our fear and our worry and our cares, I think a lot of times that fight starts and we are vigilant to be on defense against it.

But there's a hyperactivity to that vigilance.

And it's interesting because Peter calls us out to be on guard against the enemy here.

But I even think we can abuse how we're on guard.

And being vigilant is good.

Don't get me wrong.

God has wired us to have a sense about us, to see a threat, to react to a threat, and to be able to protect ourselves and the people around us.

But we have to be careful not to overdo it and try to over-control and over-protect, because that will lead us to that fear and anxiety.

And Peter's command here is very clear.

He does say to cast all our fears and anxieties on God.

And why?

Because he cares for us.

And I think that is a huge focus that we need to have.

Is that it's not just that he's going to make it go away, but he genuinely cares about the struggle.

He genuinely cares about the suffering that we're experiencing.

The next way I think we express unbelief is that we overlook the roaring lion.

So Peter lays it out in verse 8 and 9.

So I'll go ahead and reread that here.

It says, Be sober-minded, be watchful.

Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

Resist him.

Firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.

So he I love the visual, first of all.

Um maybe because I'm just real into nature things and the outdoors.

And um the visual of a prowling lion is a stark reminder of how our enemy works.

And not only that, he's there and he's present, but he's on the prowl and looking to devour us.

And if you've ever looked, if you've ever watched anything, I don't Justin has mentioned this probably a dozen times from the pulpit.

You know what I'm gonna talk about.

Yeah.

If you ever know anything about nature, it's metal.

Does anybody subscribe to that on Instagram?

Oh man, it's it's metal.

Um, that's all I'll say.

But there is so much, so the the profile is pretty much all just real, raw posts, pictures and videos of stuff that happens in nature that's just nuts.

And so much of it is predators taking down prey.

And there's a lot with lions on there.

Like there was one I saw one time where there were five lions on a giraffe, and this poor giraffe is just walking through this jungle, like it's not more like a grassland, and these five lions are just holding on to it, trying to take it down.

And good news, I saw a gas back there because somebody was not very happy that five lions were on a giraffe.

The giraffe survived five hours of that, five hours of five lions on that giraffe's back, and the lions got tired and gave up.

But typically, if you see the way big cats hunt, they typically act in a way that they use the element of surprise and that stalking behavior to catch their prey.

And that's pretty scary to think about that we have an enemy that does that.