Rise Up In Humility | Rise Up | Pastor Joe Coffey

This is a reading from First Peter chapter five.

So I exhort the elders among you,

as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ,

as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed.

Shepherd the flock of God that is among you.

Exercising oversight not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you,

not for shameful gain, but eagerly not domineering over those near charge,

but being examples to the flock.

And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading

crown of glory.

Likewise, you who are younger be subject to the elders.

Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another.

For God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God,

so that at the proper time he may exalt you.

Casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.

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.

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 to him.

Be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.

By Silvanus a faithful brother, as I regard him, I have written briefly

to you, exhorting and declaring that this is the true grace of God.

Stand firm in it.

She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings.

And so does Mark, my son.

Greet one another with a kiss of love.

Peace to all of you who are in Christ.

Everybody,

good morning and welcome to Christ Community Chapel.

My name is Joe.

I'm one of the pastors here, and I'm really glad that you've come.

This is the last week of our

ten week series we've been calling Rise Up.

We have spent this time in the book of first Peter.

And first Peter is a letter that's written to, a church

that is growing but in a hostile culture.

We decided to spend ten weeks in first Peter because it's so relevant.

It seems like for us right now, we're growing church in a culture

that is anything but friendly to our faith.

But Peter does something interesting.

He doesn't mention the culture.

He doesn't seem like he's concerned with what's going on out there with them.

He is much more concerned about what's going on in here with us.

And if you're like me, it just seems like

the culture needs to change a lot more than I do read it.

Just with all the things that are going on in schools and universities and protests

and, sexuality and crime and politics, all of it, it just seems like it's a mess.

But then I think Peter was writing to a church in Rome, in ancient

Rome was a much worse culture with leaders like Nero and Caligula,

and he doesn't mention them at all.

Instead, he focuses on on the question,

what does God want to do in you?

I almost said, what does God want to do through you?

But that's not it.

He wants to do something in you, to make you into something

beautiful, something glorious.

He wants you to reflect the very glory of God.

The way the moon reflects the glory of the sun.

And then as Christians, we become like leaven

that works its way through the whole lump of dough.

Right.

So if you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to First Peter chapter five.

If you don't have a Bible, you're not very familiar with the Bible.

Don't worry about it.

We're going to put the verses up on the screen when I talk about them.

If you want to hold something in your hand and follow along with me, you can use

one of our church Bibles and it's on page 955

and 956, in the Church Bible.

We just had the passage read to us, and the first four verses

Peter addresses the leaders of the church.

The word that's translated elder is the Greek word

presbyter us, which, actually is kind of the modern day.

The modern day equivalent is a pastor or a leader of a church.

And, it's interesting.

He talks to people like me the same way he talks to everybody,

which is, what does God want to do inside of me?

And I don't want to

spend much time on these four verses because they don't pertain to most of you.

But I want to make a couple of comments.

One is that I find it super sobering.

After pastoring this church for like for over 30 years,

that one day I will stand in front of the chief Shepherd,

who is Jesus, who loves you fiercely.

Every single one of you loves

you so fiercely that he came here

and gave his life for you, right?

And I'm going to give an account to Jesus about how well I have loved you,

cared for you, shepherded you.

And that is sobering to me.

So I want to ask you to do something.

I want to ask you to pray for the leadership of our church.

Now more than ever.

Pray for us, because a lot can go wrong in our hearts.

Just like a lot can go wrong in your hearts.

And I want to ask you to pray for three things.

Then I'm going to just point out in verses two and three, verse two, it says,

Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight

not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you,

not for shameful gain, but eagerly

pray that we would count it a privilege

and not a burden to serve, that we'd wake up every morning

excited about what we get to do, and not feeling like we have to do it.

The second and

third thing in verse three, he says, not domineering

over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.

Would you pray that we would be givers and not takers?

And there's a lot that can go into that.

But just pray that.

And then it says,

as examples to the flock, pray that we would become more like Jesus.

Just because I'm a pastor doesn't mean

that I'm becoming more like Jesus.

So would you pray for those things?

All right.

Thanks.

Enough about me. Let's talk about you.

All right, here we go.

This is what he says.

He goes on to talk to all of us. Really?

Beginning in verse five to verse nine.

He says, likewise, you who are younger be subject to the elders.

Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another.

For God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God,

so at the proper time he may exalt you, casting

all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.

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 sufferings

are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.

All right, here are the

three points that I want to use to kind of guide our time.

The first is you have an enemy.

You have an enemy.

Second point is your enemy has a strategy.

And the third point is there's a way to stay safe.

You have an enemy. Your enemy has a strategy.

There's a way to stay safe.

First you have an enemy.

Zach told us last week that a little more

than a third of this letter is about suffering.

I actually had

two people come up to me and say, you're preaching this weekend, right?

And I said, yeah.

And they they said, it's not about suffering, is it?

I mean, it's like everybody's heard enough about suffering.

So I have good news and bad news for everybody here.

The good news is this is not about suffering.

The bad news is this is about the devil.

All right.

Now, I know it's weird to talk about the devil, especially right

after Halloween when there are horror movies and costumes and,

skeletons hanging in people's yards and all of that.

But there are two mistakes that people make when it comes to the devil.

One is to take him too lightly, or even not even believe that he exists.

When I say take him too lightly, they're the movie, O brother.

Where Art thou is a movie that I really like.

But in one part of that movie, somebody asks the question, what?

What's the devil look like?

And George Clooney responds quickly.

He says, oh, the devil himself is red and scaly, has a bifurcated

tail, and carries a half fork.

And he said it in such a way that it is very funny,

but it takes him lightly.

And there's no this is one of the things

that the Bible uses imagery about the devil.

That is terrifying.

Absolutely terrifying.

Here it talks about him as a as a lion

that's prowling around seeking someone to devour.

And another part, it talks about him being the prince of the power of the air,

another part, the God of this world,

the person who talks the most about

the devil in the Bible is Jesus.

And it's always a mistake to take something lightly

that Jesus takes very seriously.

You have a spiritual enemy

and he is a formidable enemy.

Do not take him lightly.

But the other mistake that people make is

giving the devil more credit

to begin to see him all over the place

and controlling different things that he doesn't control. And

the letter first, John the

Apostle John is writing Christians, and he says something great.

He says, greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.

And what John was telling him is,

if you are a follower of Jesus, the Holy Spirit is within you,

and the Holy Spirit is way, way, way

more powerful than the devil.

My wife, Karen had a great

aunt named Aunt Vera, who lived in New York City,

and Aunt Vera was a self-proclaimed spiritist.

She held seances and read tarot cards and,

like, used the Ouija board to communicate

with the spirits, told people's fortunes or that.

And, the family didn't really think much about it

until my in-laws,

Dick and Carol Heasley, became Christians.

They were the first Christians in their whole family,

and not

long after they became Christians and Vera came to visit.

And she had come before here in Ohio to visit.

And, but this time

they didn't even know whether she knew they had become Christians.

But she came to their house and stopped at the threshold

of their house of would not go in.

She ended up going around to the back of the house,

sitting on a stoop and smoking cigarets.

The whole time.

No one knew why she didn't go in the house.

I have a theory, and my theory is greater.

Is he that is in you

than he that is in the world.

Listen, you have an enemy.

He is a formidable enemy.

Don't take him lightly.

Don't give him too much credit.

You know, you know how we tell our kids, don't take candy from strangers.

We tell them that because we don't know the intention of the stranger.

Don't ever think that Satan is offering you a little indulgence,

a little sin, like a piece of candy.

His intention is to completely devour you.

You have an enemy.

The second point is your enemy has a strategy.

Everyone's well.

I get an email from a Nigerian prince who needs my help

in getting his fortune out of the country,

and he offers me an enormous amount of money to help him,

and all I have to do is send him my bank account number and he'll start the process

right.

You've you've probably heard of this, right?

It's it's called the Nigerian letter scam.

And, Americans

fall for it to the tune of $700,000

a year. Why?

Why does anybody fall for a con?

Con artists would tell you because of greed.

A con artist would say it's very hard to get somebody to fall

for a con like that unless there's a preexisting condition.

In this case, great

Peter says,

Satan, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion,

seeking someone to devour, someone to call from the herd.

What is the preexisting condition

that the devil is looking for?

I think Peter tells us verses five through seven.

He says, likewise, you who are younger be subject to the elders.

Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another.

For God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Humble yourselves, therefore under the mighty hand of God,

so that the proper time he may exalt you, casting

all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.

And right after that he says, be sober minded.

Watch out,

the devil prowls around.

He doesn't just change subjects.

What he's doing is flowing from pride and anxiety,

right to being vulnerable to the devil.

The preexisting

condition that the devil is looking for in all of us.

One of them is pride.

Pride.

It says God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Pride will keep you from experiencing the grace of God.

If without grace, you're a sitting duck.

Period.

The problem with pride is that it comes in so many forms.

One of the way it comes.

Every once while I'll talk to somebody and I'll say, if there is a heaven,

how do you think you get there?

And the person will say, you know, I'm a pretty good person.

I try really hard.

I know I'm not perfect, but I'm better than most people.

If that's what's going on in your heart right now,

then what you're saying is you don't need a savior.

You don't need grace,

and that makes you extremely vulnerable.

But I find that pride

is something that weaves its way through me

and comes out in weird ways, like just last Thursday,

you know, Thursday we serve a meal before the service.

I gotten a plate of food.

I was heading to my office and both my hands were full.

I was trying to open a door without spilling stuff,

and somebody came by and they said, you need help.

And I was like, no, I'm good,

right?

Why would I say that?

Because even a little bit of grace

is humbling

and not so deep down

I'm proud.

Another, kind of pride

that's really scary because it makes so much sense is after

you've been to become a Christian and you've been a Christian

for while you've gotten involved with Bible studies, you've learned

how to how to read the Bible, how to pray, how to serve, how to give.

And you're doing all those things.

Then the thing you become vulnerable to is spiritual pride.

And it makes sense because after you follow

Jesus for a while, you're a better person than you used to be.

But the problem with spiritual pride is

no one can correct you because you have become the corrector,

and no one can teach you because you have become the teacher.

What Peter says is, be careful

because pride keeps you from the grace of God,

and grace is something you need more than anything else in the world,

and it is the one thing that will keep you safe.

The other thing he mentions is anxiety.

He says cast all your anxieties on him for he cares for you.

We don't like to think of anxiety as a sin,

but anxiety is the same kind of root system as pride.

Last week, Zach gave an illustration.

I thought it was a brilliant illustration.

He talked about how a pilot flying a plane will get on the intercom

and tell all the passengers that turbulence is coming in

about 20 minutes, and he does that so they'll be prepared.

But he does it even more.

So they will trust him,

right?

Jesus came to this earth,

gave himself over to the cross, and resurrected

as the greatest act of love the world has ever known.

The Apostle Paul writing to Christians in Rome.

We were going through a difficult time.

It might be, tempted to start to worry and have anxiety.

This is what he writes in Romans chapter eight.

He says he who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all,

will he not also freely with him

give us all things?

It's Paul saying, Paul is saying

you can trust him

isn't worrying.

Anxiety is always a stab at the integrity of God's love.

You begin to doubt the love of God.

You become vulnerable

to the attack of the devil.

So you have an enemy.

Your enemy has a strategy, a way to start

to call you away from the herd and attack you.

Now the question is, how in the world do we stay safe?

All right, let me start with pride.

Pride is so relentless.

You know, I remember reading about a pastor who wanted to work on humility.

So he volunteered at a rescue mission to mop the floors,

and he was mopping the floor in the middle of the night.

And the thought occurred to him, I have got to be

the only pastor humble enough in this whole town to do this.

And the moment that thought hit his head,

he dropped the mop, went home, went to bed because he realized it wasn't working

right.

The reason I

was thinking a lot about that, the reason that didn't work, is because you can't,

like, control when your pride is going

to be is kind of going to pop its head up.

You can't have it in a controlled experiment.

That's why Peter says, put on humility.

I wore a sport coat today.

Just so you see, I consciously put this on this morning.

You have to consciously put on humility because you never know

when your pride is going to get kind of tagged.

And let me just tell you this, this is a really you know, whenever

I preach or Zach preaches, we spend all week thinking about this,

and really we have to we have to preach to ourselves before we preach it to you.

And this has been a brutal week for me.

Pride wise.

I can just feel it,

because one of the things, let me tell you what you have to do.

You have to.

If you're going to do battle with pride,

you have to start trying to recognize the little signs of pride.

When you are comparing yourself to other people,

when you are mbes what other people have or other people do.

But this is the big one for me.

When you get your feelings hurt.

I remember hearing a pastor say one time that your feelings

don't get hurt, your pride gets hurt.

And I've thought about that all week and I've had opportunities to feel that.

And I my feelings get hurt when something doesn't go

my way or somebody says something or somebody leaves me out

and I realize that's just pride raising his head.

This is what I want you to do if you're going to put on humility.

What what Peter's saying

is at the beginning of the day, you have to decide, wake up tomorrow.

This is what I've been doing all week.

Wake up tomorrow morning and say to God, God, I want to put on humility

like a like a coat, like a sweatshirt.

And so I

need to remind myself this morning, I am not nearly as good as I think I am.

You are way better than I imagined you

are, and I need grace more than anything in the world.

So all day to day make me see my pride.

When my pride is hurt, I want you to pour grace in

because I need grace more than anything.

So humble me today

so I can have more grace.

I guarantee you pray that

you will have a chance to be humble,

which will give you a chance for grace.

The other thing is anxiety and anxiety

kind of stems from the same root system,

because anxiety is really, for me, an overconfidence in my own opinion.

And that's when I worry, when I think to myself, you know what?

This is not the way things should be going.

And I tell God, listen, I don't know what you're doing up there,

but if you need some help, I'm here.

Right?

I got some ideas I need to tell God.

Listen, things aren't going the way I want them to go,

but I know you love me.

You have shown that through Jesus.

I know you were wise, wiser than I am.

I will trust you

when you feel anxiety start to come up inside of you.

Think of God's wisdom and throw your anxiety on him.

When do you begin to worry and you feel that rise up in you?

Think of God's love for you and throw your worry toward him,

saying, here we are at the end of First Peter

and all throughout this letter, Peter's been asking the question, what does God

want to do in you?

He's talked a lot about emotional suffering and physical suffering,

and then he turns his attention to the spiritual realm, and it reminds

all these Christians who are a part of a growing church in a hostile culture.

You have an enemy,

is a formidable enemy,

but greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.

But your enemy has a strategy that involves pride and anxiety.

But there's a way to stay safe.

Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God

that he may exalt you at the proper time.

My prayer is that God would fill

you with his grace,

for that he needs you to be humble.

I pray that God would fill our church with grace

for that he needs us humble.

Let's humble ourselves and be prepared

for what God's going to do in us and then through us.

Would you pray with me,

father in heaven?

I'm grateful.

I'm grateful that, you don't, leave me just to continue to,

try to puff myself up and feel good about myself.

But instead, you sent Jesus

to live in my place and die my place and resurrect so he could offer me grace.

And more than anything,

I need grace in my soul

to heal me from the inside out.

And that's true of everybody here.

So I pray that you would do that in whatever situation we're in and whatever,

sin we are struggling with.

I pray that you would pour out your grace

so we could become what you made us to become.

We pray this in Jesus name and for his sake.

Amen.