1 Peter 5:5-7 Likewise, you younger, submit yourselves to the elder. Yes, all of you be subject one to another, and be clothed with humility… The two parts of the text, taken together, state this truth, that anxiety carries with it a division of faith between God and self, a lack of faith in God proportioned to the amount of care which we refuse to cast on Him; an excess of self-confidence proportioned to the amount which we insist on bearing ourselves. Therefore the apostle says, "Humble yourselves under God's mighty hand. Confess the weakness of your hand. Do not try to carry the anxiety with your weak hand. Cast it all on Him." The Revised Version has brought out a very important distinction by the substitution of "anxiety" for "care." Anxiety, according to its derivation, is that which distracts and racks the mind, and answers better to the original word, Which signifies a dividing thing, something which distracts the heart and separates it from God. The word "careth," on the other hand, used of God, is a different word in the original, and means supervising and fostering care, loving interest, such care as a father has for a child. I want to show how the spirit which refuses to give up its dividing anxiety to God is allied to pride, and unbecoming a child in the household of a Divine Father who cares for him. Pride, I say — subtle, unconscious pride — is at the bottom of much of this restlessness and worry. The man has come to think himself too important, to feel that the burden is on his shoulders only; and that, if he stands from under, there must be a crash. And, just to the degree in which that feeling has mastered him, his thought and faith have become divided from God. Let us give him his due. It is not for his own ease or reputation that he has been caring. It is for his work. And yet he has measurably forgotten, that, if his work be of God, God is as much interested in his success as he himself can be; and that God will carry on His own work, no matter how many workmen He buries. He divides the burden, and shows whom He trusts most by taking the larger part himself, when God bids him cast it all on Him. God, indeed, exempts nobody from work. We may cast our anxiety, but not our work, on Him. There are few men in responsible positions who have not felt the force of a distinguished Englishman's words, "I divide my work into three parts. One part I do, one part goes undone, and the third part does itself." That third part which does itself is a very expressive hint as to the needlessness of our fretting about at least one-third of our work, besides giving a little puncture to our self-conceit by showing that, to one-third of our work, we are not quite as necessary as we had thought ourselves. And as to the third, which the God-fearing man cannot do, and which therefore goes, or seems to go, undone, there is a further hint that possibly that third is better undone, or is better done in some other way and by some other man. A young lady had consecrated herself to the work of missions, and was about to go to India. Just at that point an accident disabled her mother, and the journey had to be deferred. For three years she ministered at that bedside, until the mother died, leaving as her last request that she should go and visit her sick sister in the far west. She went, intending to sail for India immediately on her return; but she found the sister dying with consumption, and without proper attendance; and once more she waited until the end came. Again her face was turned eastward, when the sister's husband died, and five little orphans had no soul on earth to care for them but herself. "No more projects for going to the heathen," she wrote. "This lonely household is my mission." Fifteen years she devoted to her young charge; and, in her forty-fifth year, God showed her why He had held her back from India, as she laid her hand in blessing on the heads of three of them ere they sailed as missionaries to the same land whither, twenty years before, she had proposed to go. Her broken plan had been replaced by a larger and a better one. One could not go, but three went in her stead: a good interest for twenty years. But there is a class of cases where anxiety is clearly prompted by self-interest, vanity, and worldly ambition. Self cannot cast such anxiety on God, because God will not take it. When God bids us humble ourselves, He surely will not minister to our pride. God does not hold out His arms to our burdens unconditionally; He is willing to take the burden on His hand, if we ourselves will come and stay under His hand, not otherwise. He refuses to take the care without the self. If we will put the self into His hand absolutely, He will take it, care and all. But many an one would like to cast the care on God, and keep the self in his own hand. Casting all our care on God is casting self on God, for self is our worst care. It is not merely coming to God with our failures, and asking Him to make them good, but it is confessing also that our unaided self is the worst failure of all, and saying frankly to our heavenly Father, "Without Thee I can do nothing." God has different ways of teaching this lesson. You know how a schoolmaster will sometimes shut himself up with a dull pupil, and hold him down to a problem. So God Sometimes shuts a man up with himself and his own helplessness. Even then He does not force the man's will; but He means that he shall for once look squarely at the impotence of self, that he shall for once confess to himself the fact that self has exhausted its resources, that the world cannot help him, that he has nothing in heaven or earth but God. That, as men see it, is a terrible blow to pride. The bitterest draught that ever a man is called on to drink is the confession that he cannot help himself. The world says a man is at his worst then. I am not sure of that. The Bible would say that he is just within reach of his best. The result of this humbling of self, and throwing it with its anxiety on God, is quite contrary to human logic. The world says the man who is humbled is the crushed man, the defeated man. The world is right, if the man is simply crushed into submission by overwhelming power; but the world is quite wrong if the man has voluntarily bowed the high head of his pride, and has cheerfully yielded up his will with his care to God. Such humbling, if Scripture is to be believed, is the way to exaltation: "He that humbleth himself shall be exalted." You see something of the same kind in ordinary matters. Now and then you find a man with more conceit than ability, with more self-confidence than resources, who attempts to lead a great movement, or to conduct a great business; and the very position brings out his weakness, and the more men say he is a fool and a weakling. And yet not a few men have had the sense or the grace to see the true state of the case in time, and to swallow pride, and frankly to confess weakness by retiring from a place for which they were unfit. From that moment they began to rise. They never rose to the high position which they coveted at first, but they rose to a true position which they could hold; and that was really higher than the false position which they could not hold. They became respectable and useful men, doing good work in lower places. What is true in some cases in society is true always of men in relation to God. The man is always in a false position, a position he cannot fill, when he ignores God and tries to take care of himself. He is a better man, a more efficient man, by humbling himself under God's hand and letting God take care of him. Read on a little farther in this same chapter, and you find that thought again: "The God of all grace, who hath called us unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you." Ah! that is exaltation indeed; security, steadfastness, mastery over that which burdens the world, peace which the world cannot give nor take away. (M. R. Vincent, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Likewise, ye younger, submit yourselves unto the elder. Yea, all of you be subject one to another, and be clothed with humility: for God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble. |
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