A Handful of Pebbles

1 Peter 5:5b, the Word of the Lord to us this morning,

“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.” -1 Peter 5:5–7

Before we get into this text, which is sure to confront all of us in different ways if we let it, I’d like to share some good news with you from pastor Ray Ortlund. I shared this quote with you before, on September 23, 2018, for those keeping track at home, but it’s too good not to bring out again. He says,

“Here is the good news. We do not come to Christ because we are humble. We come to Christ because we are proud, and he receives us and loves us and helps us in our pride. ‘The fear to the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” but the grace of the Lord is the beginning of the fear of the Lord. Jesus said in his parable of the wedding feast, ‘See, I have prepared my dinner … and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.” -Ray Ortlund

The good news for you and for me, Refuge, is that if we are in Christ, we are going to be a humble people by the time he is done with us, with the work he has started in us. If we are in Christ, we are on our way, inexorably and irreversibly and unfailingly, towards the green pasture of realized, actual humility. Meaning God will not rest in his work in us, his people, until he has finished the project that is us. He is not like us, who start projects and abandon them when they get hard. No, he is a finisher, and we are God’s good workmanship in Christ Jesus.

So even when we come to something like humility—and let’s be honest, we’re all proud people except for like one of us, and that guy is probably the one who thinks he is the most proud—even in something that seems as unachievable as actually becoming humble, Jesus can do it. And Jesus will do it.

And I’m convinced that part of the means he has appointed for this work of bringing us to glory is found in the paragraph before us this morning. So turning to that paragraph from our brother Peter, there are three things we need to do:

1) First, we need to understand what humility actually is, not assuming that we know or that what we think we know is the authentic article and not one of the many counterfeits. So humility, defined. This is where we’ll spend the most time.

2) Second, we need to follow the logic that Peter grounds his call to humility in. By that I mean we should ask Peter, “Why? Why should I be humble?” Because he gives us powerful answers to that question. Here we will see both humility’s warning and reward.

3) Finally, we need to get a glimpse—even if it’s just a glimpse!—of the gloriously green pastures that our Good Shepherd is taking us to by making us a humble, rather than a proud, people. That is, we’ll work to get a glimpse of humility’s fruit.

Counterfeit Humility

So first, let’s define humility. Peter writes, again look at the second half of verse 5,

“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…”

-1 Peter 5:5b–6

If that’s true, if God opposing us or giving grace to us is at stake, if humiliation and exaltation are at stake with humility, and if the Lord Jesus would clothe his people in this thing, we should work hard to understand what it actually is.