I Peter 5:7 (NASB)
“……..casting
all your anxiety upon Him because He cares for you.
During Bible
study class I was leading one Sunday, early in my teaching ministry, someone
stated, “God does not care for you so long as you love Him”! I didn’t quite understand the statement, but
it threw me off balance and I wasn’t sure how to respond. Only later did I first come across this verse
from I Peter that would have been a great retort to this convoluted/confusing
statement had I know it at that time.
God does care
about His children, believers in Him and His Son, Jesus Christ. As a child of God, you are privileged to
throw the whole weight (how Phillips translation describes this) of whatever is
making you anxious upon the Lord through your prayers and be absolutely
confident that He cares and will help you.
Peter’s letter
contains 11 verses that are direct quotes from the Old Testament. While this verse is not a direct quote, it
certainly closely relates to Psalm 55:22:
“Cast
your cares on the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous
fall”.
Faith is always at the foundation, the
crossroad, and the singular step in anything that involves your relationship
with the Lord. You cannot do more than
simply trust and believe that you, ________________ (write down your name) are
a personal concern of the Lord. You must
(not should) trust that God cares for you.
You must believe that He will sustain you through whatever is worrying
you right now. And, here’s the ultimate
in what you must believe in-----He will NEVER let you fall.
The key characteristic of the one whom God
will never allow to fall is righteousness, simply meaning being right with
God. In I Peter 5:5, the emphatic word
is humility; it is the humble believer about whom God is concerned and will
never allow to fall. So, to stand on
these promises, you must have faith that results from being a righteous, humble
person, and a life controlled by the Spirit of Christ, not your own selfish
ego.
J. Sidlow Baxter pointed out that there are
two kinds of care in I Peter 5:7. “There
is anxious care from the words ‘casting all your anxiety’ and there is affectionate
care in the words ‘He cares for
you’. Over against all our own anxious
care is our Savior’s never-failing affectionate care.”[1]
What are you
anxious about right now? Do you trust
the Lord enough that not only are you willing to pour out your heart to Him,
but also following your pleas and prayers, you can live your life without
feeling anxious? Of course, this is so
much easier said than done. It takes
consistency to keep praying every time the anxiety re-surfaces. It takes resolve to fight the human impulses
to worry rather than to pray. And it
takes great faith to believe and trust that God is true to His promises to remove
your anxieties and help you deal with and overcome whatever is causing them.
[1] J. Sidlow Baxter, Awake, My Heart: Daily Devotional Studies for the
Year, Kregel Publications, 1960, p. 294
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