Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 428
“Casting all your care upon Him. For He cares for you.” 1 Peter 5:7. No one precept contains the whole of a Believer’s duty. But usually in Scripture the precepts rise one above the other, like those stone steps by which the traveler in Egypt ascends to the pinnacle of the pyramid. You must first plant your feet firmly upon the preceding duty, before you shall be able fully to climb to the next command. Let me, then, call your attention to the precept which precedes my text—“Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time.” You know, Beloved, that there are some selfish, carnal cares which we must not cast upon God. It were an insult to Him. It were an act of infamy on our part if we should venture to ask for His assistance in them. Those are cares which would never molest us at all if we were obedient to the precept— “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God.”
This cuts off the head at once of many of those anxieties into which Christians sometimes fall. For instance, covetous cares—if I desire to get and grasp more than is absolutely necessary, that I may hastily grow rich, I cannot, on my knees, ask God to carry this care for me, because it is none of His sending. He has taught me to say, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and He has given me a blessed example in Agur, that I may pray, “Give me neither poverty nor riches.” But I cannot go on my knees before God, honestly, as a miser and ask that He would enable me to add house to house and field to field. That care I never ought to indulge and I never should endure it if I attended to the precept, “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God.”
There is, also, the care of ambition, when men desire to attain honors, eminence and fame. To stand foremost, to be exalted upon the pinnacle, to be looked up to by all and to be almost adored by some. But if we allow ambition to creep into our minds, we cannot go to God with it. It is a care which we dare not cast on God, for that were to empty the filth of our house upon the altar of God’s sanctuary. But then, I say, it is a care which would never fret us, if our souls were lowly before the Lord.
There are those cares, too, which we make for ourselves—those anxieties which anticipate the future—those foolish fears which are only created in our brain and which vex the head and then fret the heart. We cannot ask God to take those upon Himself—cares which have no existence except in our own fancies—we can scarcely cast on God. For, Beloved, we should never have them if we “humbled ourselves under the mighty hand of God.” Then, in such a state of subjection to the Divine will and of resignation to the eternal purpose, our soul would sit quietly and be still—and our spirit would not agitate itself with frivolities which it has itself imagined, with fancies which have no origin but in our own imagination.
Oh that you may have Divine Grace to obey the preceding command, and then I think, without any limitation, I may address you in the words of the text—“Casting all your care upon Him. For He cares for you.” I repeat, sinful cares we cannot cast on God. But then, obeying the precept, “Humble yourselves,” would uproot such vexations. He that is down, need fear no fall. He whose soul is even as a weaned child will fret and cry no more.
In addressing you this morning from so rich a text as this, I would pray rather that the Holy Spirit may deliver you from anxiety, than attempt to deliver you from it myself, for I am not even able to obey this precept myself, much less shall I enable you to do it. Only when the Spirit of God is upon the preacher can he cast his cares upon his God and he is convinced by experience, that only as the Holy Spirit shall enable you, will you be able to do the same.
However, that our word may be the means of your comfort and of your strengthening, let us speak on this wise. First, for a few minutes, let us expound this disease of care, giving some description of it. Secondly, let us manifest the blessed remedy of the text, endeavoring, in God’s name, to apply it. And lastly, let us hold out the sweet inducement of the second part of the sentence, in order that Believers may be led to attempt the practicing of the precept, “He cares for you.”
I. First, then, LET US ENDEAVOR TO DESCRIBE THE DISEASE OF CARE. The care mentioned in the text, even though it is exercised upon legitimate objects, (and in this it differs from the cares of which I spoke just now, which were cares concerning wrong objects)—care, even when exercised upon legitimate objects if carried to excess, has in itself the nature of sin. This will be clear if you think for a moment that anything which is a transgression of God’s command is sin, and if there were no other command, the one in our text being broken would involve us in iniquity.