“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.”
(1 Peter 5:6–7, CSB)
Before the Lord called me to the full-time pastorate, I worked as the Director of Technical Services for a company that manufactured industrial equipment. In this job, I travelled extensively by airliners all over the United States and to various parts of the world. Often, I would have to carry a lot of baggage. I would take my suitcase, attaché case, and tool kit as a minimum.
One time I vividly remember travelling from the Atlanta Airport to another location. I drove to the airport and parked in the long stay parking area. So, I took my three bags, loaded for a one-to-two-week trip, I believe to California. I was weighted down by all the baggage. This load impeded my walk to the terminal and by the time I got there, I was tired and sweaty from the load. I could not wait to unload the baggage at the check-in counter.
This is the way it is with our lives from an emotional standpoint. We carry a lot of emotional baggage. This baggage weighs us down and we are not truly well from an emotional standpoint. So, we need to find a way to unload ourselves from this emotional weight.
The first step in unloading the emotional baggage we have is to come to saving faith in Jesus. As previously mentioned, Jesus is our healer. He heals spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Since He is the healer, we need to have a relationship with Him through faith. This is the first step in casting off our baggage. We see this in Peter’s words regarding Jesus.
“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.”
The word here for cares, merimna, can also be translated as anxieties, it comes from a word that can rerefer something cut into pieces. Certainly, our anxieties or cares are emotional issues that can cut us to pieces and sometimes without us even knowing it.
Sometimes we can carry emotional wounds that are so deeply rooted from the past that they have just become the norm of our lives. To cope with these, we have developed various behavior patterns, which have become the norms of our lives. They may characterize us in our emotional being. Some of these are having a propensity towards being critical, unforgiving, bitter, angry, anxious, tense, and etcetera.
Peter tells us that when we trust Jesus, we can cast our cares, which includes our emotional baggage, on Him. However, it takes humility. We have to be humble enough to prayerfully examine ourselves to determine our weaknesses, our flaws in responses to situations and our emotions. We must do this under the mighty hand of God, agreeing with Him regarding the areas of our weaknesses, that is confession. It is not until we come to this point that we will willingly cast our cares on Jesus and then experience emotional healing.
So, let us humbly surrender to our God, and cast our cares on Jesus. Remember that Jesus cares for you deeply. It was for this reason that He went to the cross, to set us free from all that binds us, to set us free from the penalty and power of sin.
Renewing the Heart 