Word of Salvation – Vol. 20 No.08 – November 1973
Who Cares?
Advent Sermon by the Rev. A. I. de Graaf, B.D. on 1Peter 5:7
SCRIPTURE READINGS: Psalm 62; 1Peter 5:1-11
PSALTER HYMNAL: 92:1,2,6; 239: 3.4; 127:1,2,3,4; 38: 1,2.3.4; 38:5
Brothers and sisters, boys and girls, young people – congregation of our Lord Jesus:-
WHO CARES?
That’s the question this morning.
You can ask it in the wrong way of course.
The INDIFFERENT way:
WHO CARES… I don’t!
That’s not how it is meant here.
This text about casting our worries upon the Lord does not mean that I am not to worry, not to care.
But: what am I DOING with my worries, my cares?
THAT is the question.
WHO CARES?
1- I do, I must if I am alive
2- I am not the only one who does, either
3- One cares, more than we ever can.
– – – – –
YOUR ANXIETIES.
– Peter talks about in our text.
Well, we have many of them, have we not?
For instance, we may be asking, “Where is our country going?”
What will happen to the dollar? What will happen with my income so I can look after my family?
That’s a big care and if I am responsible I feel it.
I MUST feel it!
Then what will happen with my country, my city?
Is crime going to rise?
Or will my children walk the streets in safety?
Are we to remain free or might there be some greedy nation that one day will take it all and plunge us into dark tyranny? Will strikes and stoppages be allowed to go on creating havoc and driving up prices and fouling up human relations?
Then, Peter writes this text in a spiritual context. He had written about elders and their hard, hard job. In the next verse he talks about the angry, savage power of the prowling devil.
Who would NOT care?
The church of Jesus
if you LOVE it,
is a concern for you.
Where is it going,
Where is her FAITH and HOPE going? Some care about it so much that they drift from church to church seeking what is hard to find. Others care so much about it that they lie awake at nights. Who cares about the moral fibre of our nation, the living hope of our church?
We’re not onlookers watching a silly world from a safe grandstand, we’re in it, we and our children.
AND WOE TO US IF WE DO NOT CARE!
Woe to us if we do not care about who will rule Australia! Woe to us if we do not care about what will come of our children!
Woe to us if we do not care about even where our next pay packet will come from and what will happen with the firm we work fo.
Woe to us if we do not care! It is as if we all are on a big ship. And when that ship springs a leak we cannot all of a sudden become onlookers in the sky. We’re in it, man!
It’s YOUR world and mine, and it ill fits you or me to throw it all to the winds and say, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry! Tomorrow we will die!”
Yes, there are such people who DON’T care. As long as they have their beer, they don’t care what their children have to eat. As long as they have their TV show at night, they don’t care if others have bread or freedom! But THAT’s not how Christians think!
Peter talks about
“YOUR CARES
YOUR ANXIETIES”
because you jolly well have them if you’re alive!
You have them for yourself, the biggest one being how you shall please God. And you’re letting Him down so!
Yes, that’s a big care for God’s child:
Here I am, and God showered me a whole week again
with unmerited blessings and what did He ever get back?
That’s a care, an anxiety for you if you’re worth your salt as a Christian!
But maybe you’re not up to that yet.
Maybe there are people here right now and they should have an anxiety that comes before:
“Am I right with God?
AM I a child of the Lord?
for I SURE haven’t lived like one,
in spite of my Christian upbringing and my god-fearing parents!”
Yes that’s a care, too and you’re mighty irresponsible if you’re to have that care but haven’t. If then you say: “Who cares?”
– – – – –
And then secondly I’m not the only one who cares, either! Our text uses the plural word here: YOUR CARES – and YOUR means more than one person. There are cares and anxieties we share together in this world.
We learn that, these days, don’t we?
The fact that the world is getting dirtier and that food supplies may run out and that race may rise up against race in bitter violence, is a care we share with others. IF WE RE ALIVE!
The fact that our children after us may have to live in an immoral set-up, do we care about that? Shouldn’t we?
The fact that millions of people are on their way to eternal doom if they are not changed radically, do you care about that?
The fact that your country is on its way to become a heathen nation, are you involved enough to care?
In the church, do you share the anxieties of your elders because it is YOUR church, too and you love it?
Or do you cop out and say: It’s THEIR pigeon, only ready to criticize when you think they have done things wrong again?
You…, you care?
If you see what’s happening in our world, our church, maybe sister churches that used to be strong…
Do you care? Are you anxious?
Interested and involved enough to worry?
What your missionary is doing in Indonesia – do you care about that?
Most of the cares we have, we share with others.
Are you trying to cop out?
Getting with a booklet in a nooklet?
Peter in our text assumes that children of God are alive enough to have cares!
He is not so silly to say, ‘You shouldn’t have them’. That does not help, anyway.
Ah, but he DOES tell us what we MUST DO with these cares, with all of them –
And he gives the reason.
He says that we must cast these cares upon God
because God cares for us…
even when that may mean, that caring of God,
that HE CALLS US, THEN, to DO something about these things.
Yes he says, you have anxieties and cares.
How else can it be in a sinful world?
You have the care about your own soul if you have not yet a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ!
Now YOU must CAST that care upon God!
You cannot save yourself and you should stop trying that.
But you must learn to CAST THAT CARE UPON GOD.
That means you believe that GOD IS THERE
and that HE CAN SAVE TO THE UTTERMOST
Yes, that is hard work: to throw away from yourself the pack you cannot carry and to throw it upon God. But that is what He calls you to:
COME UNTO ME YOU THAT ARE WEARY
AND HEAVY LOADED
AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST!
Cast it upon God – upon the shoulders that bore the cross!
Humbly admitting: Lord I cannot ever bear it!
You have to do that more than once, I guess.
To wrestle with God that HE ALONE shall bless you!
And then you have the care about how to please Him.
About how to serve and obey Him better in a world like ours today.
The care of your lukewarm service and lazy life.
You will have to come to HIM with that, too!
You will have to take that ugly burden and instead of seeking to make amends first, cast it upon your Lord that HE shall set your feet upon the right road.
It’s good to HAVE the anxiety, Christian.
But what do you DO with it?
Cast it upon the Lord, and let HIM deal with it.
That’s hard work you know.
Who likes to throw open his ugly weakness
before the eyes that see all things
and before the ears that can detect the lies without faults?
Lord, search me and know me!
Yes, that anxiety, too, we cast upon Him!
And then there are the anxieties about people…
about my marriage… and my kids growing up.
The cares about money and my job.
The cares about injustice in our land and violence on our streets.
The cares about declining churches and growing immorality.
Peter says: Cast them all upon the LORD!
Does that not mean that first, then, I have to be sure that THIS GOD IS TRULY THERE? Yes, but when I cast my cares upon Him, that’s also a way to find out THAT He is there.
I think of Elisha after Elijah went up to heaven.
All alone, no more strong master around to lean on.
There he stands back at the Jordan
with Elijah’s prophet’s mantle in his clumsy hands.
He had seen Elijah split the waters of Jordan with it
to provide a path in the power of the Lord.
Elisha is not all that sure.
But as he now hits the water with it, he cries out
as it were in desperation: –
“WHERE IS THE LORD, THE GOD OF ELIJAH???”
and the Lord says:
Here my boy, right here! And splits the waters!
When Jacob is bothered by his own godless sins and knows he has no moral right to enter the Promised Land but the promises of the Lord which he was so unworthy of, he WRESTLES WITH THE ANGEL and hangs on for dear life:
“LORD I WILL NOT LET YOU GO UNLESS YOU BLESS ME!“
and thus he does get the blessing
and finds out that the Lord is still as good as His Word!
Casting all our cares upon the Lord…
The cares also which we share with our world,
The cares about the heathen overseas and the heathen in Australia,
The cares about our church and our world…!
It means to wrestle with God about them,
and going with these burdens to HIM WHO IS ALIVE,
even though at times this may mean to cry out:
“LORD IF YOU ARE ALIVE, OH THEN ANSWER ME!”
We cast upon the Lord even the pestering care of our doubt (oh that ministers would do that rather than take these doubts from their prayer room into the pulpit to saddle their congregations with them.)
We cast them upon the Lord for HE invited us to do so
and then we find out.. . .
HE CARES FOR US.
Now mind you, He cares for us QUITE OFTEN
by giving back to us the very problems we cast upon Him.
But then they are no more problems
but they become HIS COMMANDS
and boy do they then look different!
When we cast upon HIM the care, the problem,
of the preaching of the Gospel in a needy world
it can WELL be His way of caring for us
that HE puts before us a CALL to go into mission work ourselves
or to GIVE to it more meaningfully.
But straight away then it is no more our WORRY
for HE who calls is faithful and will also do it!
We can then obey Him to the best of our ability and trust Him for the result.
When we cast upon HIM the care,
the problem of the moral decay that confronts our children
He may WELL show us the way out
in the establishment of a Christian school
or in the need for us to go to the P&C meeting
of the school where the kids are now.
That will not be easy and even hard work…
and maybe we’ll get rubbished,
but when it is HIS call it is HIS worry.
We DO NOT HAVE TO WORRY ANY MORE,
that is now HIS job,
we only have to OBEY and leave the outcome to Him.
When we are flat out obeying we simply have no more time TO WORRY.
Now THAT’s how the Lord often works.
“He cares FOR you!”
Yes, for He is a sovereign God.
He has more servants than me, and more solutions than I can think of today.
HE CARES FOR YOU…. and that became true in its fullest sense
when He died for me,
when He went into hell for me.
That’s when He took upon Himself the care and bitter anxiety of my sin.
Fear not, only believe! said Jesus, to the sin-sick,
and only HE did all that was needed for the healing.
He does the caring for you.
Yes, for burdens are lifted at Calvary,
and His coming down to Bethlehem
was not a sight-seeing trip, either.
He came to care for me,
to take upon Himself my care, my burden
AND THE CARE AND BURDEN OF a sighing world!
He came to bring back here the Kingdom of God.
He cares FOR ME all right… for who can care like He can?
Care and then DO something like THAT about it?
At times we are thinking that God does not care
and that Jesus doesn’t either
for they have it good in heaven
while we here cannot get the mess cleared up by a long shot.
We plod from the one peace conference to the other
and drag ourselves from one study meeting to another.
And elders sit around Session room tables
with backs bent under the burdens
so that many would rather get OUT of such a job
and leave it to others.
Lord God, DO you care?
Where are you then, if you do?
There is a devil prowling around, roaring like a lion.
There are worries enough, but Lord, who cares?
“I do!” says the Lord! “Cast them on Me and see what happens!”
YOU do the obeying and let ME do the worrying!
If you have a heart, you MUST have cares and worries.
But now have faith in Me – says God – that I Who sent My son to you, care even more.
And God’s caring was no fruitless worry:
His care was the death of His Son and His victory over death!
His caring for us was the beginning of new heavens and a new earth.
He calls us now, to lift up our heads and obey Him,
trust Him and praise Him already.
He is busy with our problems!
The morning dawns!
Alleluia!
Amen.