Stand Firm

Today is a day for parting words. How might I address you on our last Sunday together? Well, lucky for me, Peter has some interesting parting words of his own to share with us this morning.

1. Humble yourselves. Peter begins by telling us to humble ourselves before the mighty hand of God. The Message says “be content with who you are. Don’t put on airs.” When we humble ourselves, we place ourselves in a lower position, in this case beneath the hand of God. This phrase, “the mighty hand of God,” has roots in the Old Testament. This is the hand that delivered Israel from Egypt often referenced as the deliverance and rescue of God.

Peter is saying to place yourself beneath God’s hand that rescues, restores, and exalts in due time. To place yourself under the hand of God is to trust God.

2. Cast your cares on him, for he cares for you. Cast your cares. Notice how we can only cast our cares upon the Lord out of a place of humility. We can only cast our cares from a place of surrender, not one of control.

Sharon Hodde Miller in her book The Cost of Control says “the more we seek control, the less control we feel.” She says too often in our society today, we are discipled by the illusion of control. But in the Bible, the word for control is almost always in reference to God because control is a God category, not a human one.”

Cast your cares upon him. Not reluctantly. Not timidly. Don’t play tug-of-war with them where you still hang onto one end just in case. Cast your cares. Because he cares for you. This isn’t a Hallmark card saying. This is Peter calling for the disciples to surrender full trust to God, even when it is hard.

Discipline yourselves and keep alert. In other words, don’t let your spirit get lazy. Keep calm and watchful.

3. Because the enemy is at work and ready to attack. Peter describes the devil like a roaring lion on the prowl. Last week we talked about the Holy Spirit as the Advocate. This week the enemy is described as the adversary,, opponent, or even slanderer.

To understand this a bit more, let’s look at the context of what Christians were going through during this time. Earlier in 4:14, Peter describes the early Christians as going through a fiery ordeal. What might he be referencing here?

In 64 AD, a great fire broke out in Rome, destroying much of the city. It is rumored that Emperor Nero started the fire, but there is no evidence to support it. What Nero did do is use the fire to further his agenda against the Christians. He blamed them for the fire in Rome and persecuted them for their beliefs. This included many horrific acts including setting people on fire.

This fiery ordeal of the early Christians is shocking and not anything we want to imagine nor is it anything we relate to. It is a level of suffering that we don’t understand. We do not know this kind of suffering, but we know the pain of loss and sickness and heartache. We know vicarious suffering through violence in other places around us. We know natural disaster and freak accidents and widespread rumors. And yet, Peter says don’t be surprised when you are going through this, as if it were something strange.

Rather, rejoice in that you share in the sufferings of Christ. I don’t know about you, but this is hard to hear. Rejoice? In my suffering? Really Peter? Maybe you’re thinking “Hannah, couldn’t you have chosen a different text today? Couldn’t you have chosen something a little more, upbeat?” But Peter knows that Christians in the thick of persecution need something more. They need purpose when suffering lingers.

K.J. Ramsey began to struggle with chronic pain at a young age and she ended up writing this beautiful book This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers. K.J. was talking with her friend Elizabeth from college one day when her friend shared how when she was younger she thought” I hope suffering will wait for a while at least.” Elizabeth shared about all the pain and loss she had experienced in her life since then. Then she said that somehow suffering had brought her to some of the most beautiful relationships in her life (Ramsey, 100).

Like Elizabeth, we often try to run from suffering, to bargain with it, to delay it, to deny it, or to just over it and beyond it. We too pray that suffering would lessen or hold off or wait a while. I do this too.

K.J. Ramsey says that as humans we always try to escape suffering because we were not made for it. Our bodies and our spirits were not created to suffer. We were made in the image of wholeness and love, not suffering. Yet in this fallen world our suffering is precisely how we come to share in the body and blood of Christ.

Thomas A Kempis in his Imitation of Christ says it this way: “Jesus has many who love his kingdom in heaven, but few who bear his cross. He has many who desire comfort, but few who desire suffering. He finds many to share his feast, but few his fasting. All desire to rejoice with him, but few are willing to suffer for his sake. Many follow Jesus to the breaking of bread, but few to the drinking of the cup of his passion. Many admire the miracles but few follow him to the humiliation of the cross. Many love Jesus as long as no hardship touches them.”

Our suffering is touched by the suffering of Christ, and the place of suffering becomes the place of our transformation. Kelly Kapic says “God, who cannot get sick, who cannot grow hungry, who cannot bleed, who cannot die- this God comes near so that the impossible becomes possible.” Ramsey says “The seemingly impossible task of enduring suffering and rejoicing in it is born in the impossible reality that God became human. The implausibility of having joy in a body with an incurable disease is made possible by God in a body. The possibility of hope in your despair is alive, here, as close as your breath.” We can cast our cares on the One who loved us enough to hold all our suffering within his body.

So that any time we suffer, we are met with the One who knows our suffering even more than we do. So that when our suffering wants to break us, the Suffering One intercedes on our behalf.

4. Stand firm in your faith, and know that you are not alone. Brothers and sisters in Christ all over the world are enduring the same kind of sufferings.

Stand firm in your faith. This isn’t firm like the ground you stand on but rather firm like a vow that you take. This is a firm faith that is the strength of God when we are weak. It is a faith that has a deep root system. In other words, it knows it isn’t alone.

Sometimes we believe the lie that we have to suffer in private or alone, like an orphan. But there is power in bearing witness to suffering in the context of community. K.J. talked about her friend Sara who just kept showing up. She would wash her dishes and bring her meals. She never judged the mess or the depression or the tears. She just-kept-showing-up. When my dad was sick several years ago, I remember the people that kept showing up for him. Just to take him for a ride. Or just sit with him. They joined him in his suffering. Now that he is well, he does the same for others. He will go to visit a sick friend or someone who has the same kind of cancer he had and sit with them.

***I have watched you do this together. I have watched you endure one another’s suffering together, with cards and homemade soup and car rides and desperate prayers and wiping away one another’s tears. Ramsey says “the gospel offers a better story, read not only in black letters on white pages but in the bodies of believers, words made flesh in the places of our pain. The gospel plants the seeds of Christ’s life in our souls in the sowing of shared tears and the wordless resonance that happens when one right brain communicates love to another.”

As a community of faith, we join one another in our suffering, and the wounded Lord meets us and enfolds us into the love of God as we await a day when suffering will cease to exist.

Peter says when you get through this. Let me say that again. When you get through this, then:

5. the God of all grace who has called you to eternal glory will restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.

Our share in suffering has a time limit, but our share in glory is eternal. Suffering may have a say in our life, but the suffering servant, the wounded healer, the Man of sorrows has the final say. And it is a say that will restore life, hold you up, fill you with all strength, and ground you.

Place yourselves beneath the mighty hand of God and trust him.

Let him have all of your cares, because he cares for you.

It won’t be easy, but stand firm, for you are not alone.

The God of all glory has plans for you, to restore you and strengthen you.

These are Peter’s parting words. Words to leave by, and words to live by.