Week 5: 1 Peter 5:6-7

“Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.”
1 Peter 5:6-7

Wow!  What a promise!  We humble ourselves before the Lord and He exalts us!?!  Seems a little backwards doesn’t it?  What exactly do we mean by exalted.  Webster’s Dictionary defines exalt as, “to raise in rank, power or character.” and “to elevate by praise or in estimation : Glorify”  Are you getting how ridiculous this idea is?  And as if that isn’t enough, we also have the promise that we can cast all our anxiety on Him because He cares for us!

The Lord of all creation.  The Creator of the heavens and the earth. I AM!  Everything that God was and is and is to come is going to exalt us!  Everything that God is and He cares about our anxiety and worries.  It should be the other way around!  We should be the ones exalting Him.  That’s not the promise though.

So what does it mean to humble ourselves before God?  It’s all about your heart.  We have to come to the realization that He is God and we are not.  I like this promise in 1 Peter because it says that God will exalt us “at the proper time”.  I think this is a huge part of being humble before God, realizing that He has everything under control, including the time line of things.  Being humble before God isn’t worrying about how we are going to get our schedules to work or why we aren’t being healed or delivered from something on our time table, but instead giving it all to God because He is worthy of having it all.

Humble is the opposite of proud.  It’s giving everything we have to God – our money, our talents, our relationships – and knowing that He can do it all better than we ever could.  It’s laying all of our trophies down at the feet of Jesus and no longer striving for human accolades, but only for the love of the Father.

Yesterday in church, our worship pastor, Pastor Amanda, talked about why we lift our hands during worship service.  She talked about how it is an outward showing of what is going on inside of our hearts.  The same happens for me when I am humbling myself before God.  I like to get on my knees to pray; not because it’s comfortable…it’s not…and not because God hears me better from that position, but because it is an outward showing of what’s going on in my heart.  There are even times when I become so humbled by God that my knees aren’t low enough and I find myself flat on my face, practically trying to dig a hole in the floor to get low enough before the Almighty.

You don’t have to do those things.  It can be a very good place to start for no other reason than to allow your body to mirror your heart.  Humbling ourselves before God isn’t an act though, it’s a way of life.  Just like abiding in Christ.  And just like the abiding we did last month, I am looking forward to humbling myself under God’s mighty hand until it becomes so natural that I am constantly living in a state of humility before God.

Have a great week MOVING!