Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
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.