Faith and Victory

1st Peter 5:6,7 - “Humble yourselves under God’s might hand so that He will raise you up at just the right time. Throw all of your anxieties to Him because He cares about you.”

After John 3:16,18, I think these two verses from Peter’s letter are the most important verses in the Bible. At least for anyone wanting to live a victorious Christian life.

The hardest thing for people to do, for Christians to do is to trust God. It sounds stupid but it’s true. For most of us, we experience God working in our lives. We marvel at it. We share our story with others, and then we take back control of our lives until God demonstrates His love for us all over again at some point in the future. It’s like the story of the guy by the side of the road with a heavy suitcase, thumbing a ride. Someone picks him up. He climbs into the vehicle, buckles up and sits there holding the suitcase on his lap. After awhile the driver says, “Why don’t you put your suitcase on the floor?” The guy says, “No, I wouldn’t want to give your car a bigger load than it already has.”

Because we don’t trust God as we should, we hitch a ride with Him, but we keep carrying our worries, our anxieties, our problems. Mature Christianity, victorious Christian living happens when our focus is on what God has done not just in our lives but in the lives of others. When we look back on how our life has turned out, we can clearly see how lucky we were that things didn’t go our way. We can clearly see how if there hadn’t been road blocks to our strategy or our timing, things wouldn’t have gone nearly as well as they did when God took control.

God cares about us. As the Bible asks, “Will God, who didn’t even spare His own Son to give us what we need, withhold anything less than that, in order to meet our needs?" Of course not. He has not, does not and will not leave us or give up on us.”