Casting Our Cares on God
1 Peter 5:6-7[1]
Life brings us all kinds of unexpected
experiences. Some of them are better than we could ever possibly imagine. I can
still remember holding my oldest son Derek on the day he was born. He’s pushing
40 these days, and there’ve been a lot of wonderful memories with him and with
my other children since then, but that memory stands out. It was fulfilling and
awe-inspiring at the same time to hold my firstborn son. Other experiences in
our lives are worse than we could ever possibly imagine. I never dreamed I
would be divorced on that day when I was holding my son. It just wasn’t
something I could have even wrapped my head around. I can’t say that I was ever
a perfect husband, but I gave my all and my best to my marriage. Unfortunately,
the sad truth is that these things just happen to us sometimes.
Of course, there have been a lot of
experiences that fall somewhere in between “the best day of my life” and the
“worst day of my life.” Many of them have been good and wonderful. Others have
been stressful, hurtful, discouraging, and even frightening. Through it all,
like many of you, my testimony is that God has always been faithful. Always!
And through it all, I’ve continually tried to follow the instruction of our
Scripture reading for today from 1 Peter to “Give all your worries and cares to
God, for he cares about you” (1 Pet 5:7, NLT). Those of us who first
learned this Scripture verse decades ago will remember it in the older Bible
translations: “casting all your cares on him, for he cares for you.” However
you translate it, it’s an important part of the life of faith that Peter was
trying to teach to the believers of his day. We learn to trust God precisely by
entrusting to him the cares and worries of our lives.
In those older translations, it may be easier
to see that enacting our faith by entrusting all our cares and worries into
God’s care is connected with our overall approach to life. In the preceding
verses, Peter makes that connection clear: “all of you, dress yourselves in
humility as you relate to one another, for ‘God opposes the proud but gives
grace to the humble.’ So humble yourselves under the mighty power of God, and
at the right time he will lift you up in honor” (1 Pet 5:5-6, NLT). And
then he goes on to say, “Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares
about you.” In the context, Peter is addressing relationships within their
community of faith. But he’s talking about principles that apply generally to
the life of faith. The faith to entrust all our cares and worries into God’s
care is inherently connected to the attitude of humility Peter encourages them
to practice. You really can’t have one without the other!
I’m not sure that we always make that
connection these days. Part of the problem is that we need a working knowledge
of the Bible do so. And there are a lot of those connections in the Psalms.
That’s why the Psalms have been viewed by the faithful throughout the ages not
only as an important source for learning to pray, but also for learning faith.
The passage I think of when I read our lesson from 1 Peter is Psalm 55:22,
“Give your burdens to the Lord, and he will take care of you” (NLT).
Again, many of us may remember that verse in a more traditional version: “Cast
your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you.” What we may not know is
that assurance in the Psalm was set in the context of a prayer for deliverance
from friends who turned out to be enemies. If you’ve ever experienced that, you
may know how deeply unsettling it can be, and how hard it can be to entrust
your “burdens” and your “cares” to God when it happens to you!
I’ve mentioned before that John Calvin
connected this passage to a different Psalm. He saw it as a reflection of Psalm
38. That Psalm has a similar setting. The Psalmsinger is at wit’s end because
he’s being attacked by those who were “foes without cause” and who had repaid
him “evil for good” (Ps 38:19-20). His suffering was so great that he could
say, “I am utterly spent and crushed” by the turmoil he was undergoing (Ps
38:8). It was so great that even his friends and family kept their distance
from him, likely only increasing the burden (Ps. 38:11). It was in that setting
that the Psalmsinger reminded himself and us that God sustains us even in the
most difficult of times, even in times that are harder than we could ever
imagine. He says it this way, “For I hope in You, O Lord; You will answer,
O Lord my God” (Ps 38:15, NASB).
One of the challenging twists in this Psalm is
that the Psalmsinger sees all of this turmoil and hardship as “discipline” from
the Lord! Psalm 38 opens with a plea: “O Lord, do not rebuke me in your
anger or discipline me in your wrath” (Ps 38:1). We’re familiar with the
idea that God “disciplines those he loves” (Prov 3:12). But associating that with
God’s anger and wrath may not only be unfamiliar, it may be troubling to us. I
know when I was in college, and I read Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God,” which is widely considered to be one of the great American
sermons of all time, I found the image of God portrayed there to be disturbing
to say the least. It was as if God took delight in dangling “sinners” over the “open
fires” of “hell.” When we read about God’s anger and God’s wrath toward his
people in the Hebrew Bible, it may cause us to wonder how much we can really
trust that God’s love for us never fails!
But here’s where it all ties together. In the
Hebrew Bible, God’s “anger” and “wrath” are a kind of “last resort” response
when God’s people stubbornly refuse to follow God’s ways. Paul says that when anyone
refuses to honor God as God, he “hands them over” to the consequences of their
choices (Rom 1?). The language the Bible uses for that is “pride.” I don’t
think the Bible is talking about a natural human sense of satisfaction we gain
from a job well done, or from seeing someone we love succeed. I don’t think it
refers to the “pride” we may feel when hold our newborn children and
grandchildren. I think “pride” in the Bible refers to when we know what the
right thing to do is, and we simply refuse to do it. It refers to a deliberate
rejection of God and God’s ways. “Pride” is a deliberate refusal to honor God
as God by humbling ourselves enough to not only hear God’s truth but also to
repent when we’ve gone astray. Simply put, “Pride” means intentionally
rejecting God’s will for our lives.
That brings us back to the connection between
humility and faith in our lesson from 1 Peter for today. Peter reminds us that
we cannot practice the faith to entrust all the cares and worries of our lives
into God’s care without humility! And that’s the lesson that John Calvin draws
from this passage. He reminds us that those who are humble are those who
recognize that they cannot rely on their own abilities or insights or resources
alone, but rather they seek their refuge and help and strength “from God
alone,”[2] especially in times of trouble. I’ll be the first one to admit that’s easier
said than done! But it seems to me that’s the heart of the challenge that our
lesson from Peter presents to us today. It’s a challenge to set aside our
natural inclination to believe that we know what’s best, to think that we can
fix things ourselves, or to insist that if we could just get everything under
our control, it would all work out fine. Rather, learning to cast all our cares
on God, as Peter instructs us, requires us to learn the lesson of the Psalms,
that we can only entrust our lives into God’s care when we humble ourselves
enough to recognize that only God can sustain us through the twist and turns
this life can bring our way!
[1] © 2026 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 5/17/2026 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic
Epistles, 148.
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