In January of 1956, five American missionaries flew a small plane into the jungle of eastern Ecuador and landed on a sandbar along the Curaray River. They had spent months making contact with the Auca Indians, a tribe known for their fierce violence toward outsiders. They had dropped gifts from the air, made radio contact, and believed the door was opening for incredible Kingdom advancement. Then, in the blink of an eye, on January 8th, all five of them were speared to death on that riverbank.

Their names were Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Nate Saint, and Roger Youderian. They were young men with wives, and even some of them had small children. What is interesting is that those five men were armed and could have used force at any moment to escape. Elizabeth Elliot recounted that those five missionaries made a deliberate decision before they flew in, promising they would never use their weapons against the Aucas, even if they were attacked. Their reasoning was stated simply and without any drama. “They’re not ready for heaven, and we are.”

I want you to sit with that for a moment before we go any further. Five men walked into what they understood was a potentially lethal situation and felt more concern for the eternal state of the people who might kill them than for their own lives. That is not natural courage. That is not the product of a personality type or a particularly adventurous spirit. That is what happens to a human soul when eternity becomes more real than the moment they are standing in. That is what Peter is after in the final passage of this letter.

We have spent this entire journey through 1 Peter talking about what it means to be anchored in Christ. Anchored in hope, in holiness, in love, in community, in submission, in marriage, in peace, in victory, in perseverance, in joy, and last week, in serving. And now Peter brings everything to a close with the anchor that holds all the others in place. If you do not have this one, the rest will not hold when the pressure comes.

You must be anchored in eternity.

1 Peter 5:6-14 says: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your cares on him, because he cares about you. Be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour. Resist him, firm in the faith, knowing that the same kind of sufferings are being experienced by your fellow believers throughout the world. The God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, establish, strengthen, and support you after you have suffered a little while. To him be dominion forever. Amen. Through Silvanus, a faithful brother (as I consider him), I have written to you briefly in order to encourage you and to testify that this is the true grace of God. Stand firm in it! She who is in Babylon, chosen together with you, sends you greetings, as does Mark, my son. Greet one another with a kiss of love. Peace to all of you who are in Christ.”

Three movements in this passage. And together they tell us what it looks like to live, suffer, and face death with your eyes fixed on a horizon that never fades.

Humility and Exaltation

Peter ends this entire letter the same way he ended last week’s passage (click HERE for previous article). He returns to humility and when a man who is preparing to die by crucifixion keeps coming back to the same theme, we should take it seriously. “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you at the proper time.” The “therefore” is doing important work. Peter has just told the congregation that God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble. Now he draws the conclusion: if that is true, and it is, then the only rational response is to humble yourself before that God. Not reluctantly. Not with conditions or as a last resort when everything else has failed. Instead, willingly and actively as an ongoing posture of the heart.

The phrase “mighty hand of God” is a direct echo of the Old Testament. It is language that the scattered Jewish believers would have recognized immediately. It is the same phrase used in Exodus to describe God’s power in delivering Israel from Egypt. Deuteronomy 26:8 says God brought Israel out of Egypt “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” Peter is invoking the entire history of divine deliverance when he uses this phrase. He is saying, the same hand that parted the Red Sea, that held back Pharaoh’s army, that fed a nation in the wilderness for forty years, that is the hand under which you are placing yourself when you choose humility. That is not weakness. That is the most strategically sound decision a human being can make.

The Puritans understood this at a level our culture has largely forgotten. Jonathan Edwards, in his lectures on religious affections, argued that genuine humility is always accompanied by a profound sense of God’s greatness and the soul’s corresponding smallness. It is not self-deprecation for its own sake. It is not a performance of meekness for social approval. It is the natural response of a soul that has actually seen something of who God is. When Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up in Isaiah 6, his immediate reaction was not inspiration. It was “Woe is me, for I am ruined.” That is the response of a person who has seen reality clearly. Humility is not what you perform, it is what happens when you see truth.

When President Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981, and was recovering in the hospital, he spilled some water on the floor and quietly began wiping it up himself. When told that someone would take care of it, he refused. He did not want the nurse to be blamed for something she did not do. The most powerful man in the world, recovering from an assassination attempt, on his hands and knees wiping water off a hospital floor. Humility is not lost on circumstances. It persists in them. Peter goes even further. He says there is a specific gift that flows from walking in humility before God.

Deliverance from Anxiety

“Casting all your cares on him, because he cares about you.”

These words were written to people who had genuine reasons to be anxious. They had been scattered from their homes. They were living as exiles in a culture that resented them. Nero’s persecution was intensifying. Some of them had already lost family members to violence. The threat of arrest, torture, and death was not abstract for these people. It was the reality of Tuesday morning.

Peter says to cast their cares on the Lord. The word “casting” here, epiripsantes in Greek, is not a gentle word. It is the same word used in Luke 19:35 when the disciples threw their cloaks onto the back of the colt Jesus rode into Jerusalem. It carries the sense of a deliberate, decisive throwing. You don’t just set your anxiety down carefully beside you. You hurl it toward God. You release it with intention. Why? Because of who’s on the other end of that throw.

“He cares about you.” That phrase sounds simple until you understand what it cost to be true. The God who holds the world together, who numbers the stars and calls them each by name, who sustains every heartbeat in every creature on the planet, that God has recorded your wanderings. He has put your tears in a bottle. Psalm 56:8 says exactly that, and it is one of the most staggering verses in Scripture if you will let it land. Every moment of grief you have carried, every night you lay awake, every loss you could not explain, He collected it. He kept it. Because you matter to Him at a level that your own finite mind cannot fully comprehend.

Thomas Watson, the great Puritan pastor and author of All Things for Good, wrote that anxiety is ultimately a theological problem before it is a psychological one. The anxious soul has, in that moment, forgotten something true about God. Watson said we cast our care on God not because we are strong enough to let it go, but because we have remembered that He is strong enough to hold it. The antidote to anxiety is not willpower. It is theology. It is remembering who carries what you cannot.

Discipline for Adversity 

But Peter will not let you get comfortable. Right after the comfort of verse 7 comes the warning of verse 8. “Be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour.”

The comfort of God’s care does not eliminate the reality of spiritual warfare. In fact, Peter seems to understand that the moments of greatest relief are precisely the moments of greatest vulnerability. When you have just cast your anxiety on God, when you feel the weight lift, that is the moment to become more watchful, not less. Notice how Peter describes the devil. He is prowling around like a roaring lion. Not as a lion. Like one. This distinction is not trivial. Satan is an imitator. He is the deceiver, the faker, the one who presents himself as something he is not. A real lion announces its presence with a roar. But a lion hunting does not roar. It moves in silence, studying the landscape, identifying the weak or the isolated. Peter is describing something more like a predator on surveillance than a predator on a full charge.

The imagery draws directly from the book of Job, where God says to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job?” Biblical scholars have noted that the Hebrew verb translated “considered” is a military term describing a general who surveys terrain before attacking, mapping out the vulnerabilities, identifying where the defenses are weakest. Satan studies you. He is patient. He is not looking for a fair fight. He is looking for the moment when your guard is down, when you are exhausted, isolated, or bitter, and that is when he moves.

Peter knew this from experience. In the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus needed the disciples to pray, Peter slept. He was not alert. He was not watchful. And within hours he had denied the Lord three times in the courtyard of the high priest. Peter writing this warning is Peter writing from scar tissue. He had felt the bite of the enemy’s deception when he was least prepared for it, and he never forgot what that felt like.

The good news is in verse 9. “Resist him, firm in the faith.” The same God who cares for you is greater than the adversary who is after you. The suffering you are experiencing is not unique to you. Believers all over the world are enduring the same kind of trials. You are not alone in the battle.

The Glory of Eternity

Everything in this letter has been moving toward verse 10. It is the capstone of the entire epistle, the place where Peter pulls back the curtain and shows you the whole picture. “The God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, establish, strengthen, and support you after you have suffered a little while.”

Read that phrase again: the God of all grace. Not some grace. Not limited grace. Not grace that is sufficient for most circumstances but runs thin under extreme pressure. All of it. Every ounce of grace that exists in the universe is His, and He has directed it toward you through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Then Peter stacks four verbs on top of each other that describe what God is doing and will do for you. Restore. Establish. Strengthen. Support.

Restored in Eternity

The word “restore” in Greek is katartizei, and it is a word Peter would have known from a completely different context. It is a fisherman’s word. It is the same word used in Matthew 4:21 when James and John were “mending” their nets before following Jesus. To restore something is to put it back in order, to repair what was broken, to make functional what had been damaged. Peter is using his own trade to describe what God is doing in your life. The nets of your soul that have been torn by suffering and trial, God is mending them. He is bringing them back to the order and purpose He always intended. Not patching them poorly, but restoring them completely. One day that restoration will be total and permanent. What sin and suffering have broken in you will be perfectly repaired in glory.

Established in Eternity

“Establish” translates sterixei, which carries the idea of being set firmly in place, stabilized against movement. Ephesians 4 uses similar language when Paul says that maturity in Christ means you are no longer children tossed by every wave and blown about by every wind of doctrine. When you are established in Christ, you cannot be uprooted by circumstance, shaken by opposition, or dislodged by the storms that press in from every direction. The anchor holds. Not because you are holding it, but because He has set you in place.

Strengthened in Eternity

“Strengthen” speaks to an increase of capacity that comes directly from God’s power operating within you. Paul captures this beautifully in 2 Corinthians 4. He says our outer person is being destroyed. He is not minimizing that. He is not telling suffering people that it is not really that bad. He is acknowledging the destruction openly, and then pointing to something happening simultaneously in the interior life. The inner person is being renewed day by day. The momentary light affliction is producing something. It is not wasted. It is generating “an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory.” Suffering, when carried under the hand of God, is not simply endured. It is transformed into something that will outweigh it in eternity by a measure that language cannot capture.

Supported in Eternity

The final word, “support,” carries architectural weight. It is the language of a foundation being laid, of columns being set, of load-bearing material being placed with precision. Peter is saying Christ is not just with you in the storm. He is the structure under you. He is the ground beneath your feet. Every moment of your life rests on Him, and He does not shift. He does not settle or crack. He holds.

And then Peter says, “To him be dominion forever. Amen.” That is a man who has stared down his own death and arrived at a place of settled conviction. To Him. Not to circumstance. Not to political authority. Not to the Roman emperor who will order his execution. Not to the devil who is prowling. To God belongs the dominion, forever. And that reality does not depend on how Tuesday is going.

John Owen, who lived through the English Civil War, the execution of a king, the collapse of the Puritan government, and the subsequent persecution of Nonconformists under Charles II, wrote near the end of his life that the sovereignty of God over history was not a doctrine he found comforting in the abstract. It was the very ground he stood on when everything else had been taken. Owen said that the man who is truly convinced of God’s eternal dominion lives with a freedom that no external circumstance can manufacture or destroy. This is what Peter is pointing to. The God of all grace is in charge. He always has been. He always will be. 

This is what Peter has been building toward through five chapters. You are chosen exiles. You are strangers here. The world is watching how you handle suffering, and the watching world needs to see something it cannot explain by natural means. It needs to see people who are genuinely free. Free to serve. Free to suffer. Free to forgive. Free to love enemies. Free to hold loosely what others grip with white knuckles. Free, because the anchor holds, and the anchor reaches beyond anything this present age can touch.

He will restore what is broken. He will establish what feels shaky. He will strengthen what is wearing thin. He will support what feels like it is about to collapse.

Stand firm in it.

Church family,

I want to personally invite you to join us this Wednesday night for our Prayer Gathering. In a world filled with noise, distraction, and anxiety, there is nothing more important for the people of God than gathering together to seek His face.

Throughout Scripture, every great movement of God was preceded by a praying people. The early church prayed, and the gospel spread. The disciples prayed and were filled with boldness. God’s people prayed, and heaven moved. We do not want to simply be a busy church. We want to be a dependent church.

This Wednesday, we will open God’s Word, worship together, and spend intentional time praying for our church, our families, our city, and for God to move in revival and power among us. Whether you feel spiritually strong or spiritually weary, come. There is a place for you in the presence of God and among the people of God.

Do not underestimate what God can do through one church united in prayer.

I hope to see you there.

How can you get ready for this Sunday? Go ahead and start reading Luke chapter 13:10-21. This Sunday’s message from Luke 13 is called “When Everything Changes.”

Have you ever had a moment where one encounter, one word, or one realization changed the entire direction of your life? Luke 13 gives us one of those moments. It is powerful, deeply personal, and unbelievably relevant for where so many people are living right now. Jesus walks into a room full of religious people, suffering people, skeptical people, and distracted people… and by the time He is finished, nothing is the same.

I truly believe this is a message our church needs in this moment. Come expecting to be challenged, encouraged, convicted, and reminded that Jesus still changes lives today.

See you Sunday!

You are loved and prayed for!

Michael Gossett