A Not-so-brief Description of Casting Our Cares on God
“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.” I Peter 5:6-7
There are some things it can be hard to convince people of—spiritually speaking. It can be difficult to persuade people sin really is a big deal or that their own hearts are often a bigger problem than the people we blame. One thing needing little convincing of is that life is hard and the struggles prove wearying. The phrase “cast your cares on God” has been both a hope believers cling too and an encouragement for how to respond in life’s hardships. For some, it might be evident what the words require of us as the one letting something go and what it promises from God as the one taking something from us. Or, like what is often true for believers, while the meaning might be apparent what seems ambiguous is how we actually go about doing it. My hope is to clarify the phrase’s meaning—primarily from I Peter 5—[1]but also explore both how we might cast our cares on God as well as why we don’t do it in the first place.
Foundations for Casting
In I Peter 5:6-7 the first and primary action is “humble yourselves.” Both the larger context in I Peter of the suffering church and the language of the verse itself—“suffering under the mighty hand of God”—remind us that our attitude in struggles, suffering, and trials should be humility. In verse 6 and again in verse 11 Peter tells us that God is the Sovereign One who allows into our lives whatever comes to pass. These things neither catch Him off guard nor are they evils outside of His control. His Providence means that while He neither does evil to us nor tempts us with evil, he allows and orchestrates all of the events and circumstances in our life. This doesn’t imply that every single thing in our life is by itself good—the world is still broken and sin is still seen as evil—but that every single thing does have a good purpose for those who are God’s children (Rom. 8:28-30). Peter therefore admonishes us to respond with submission to God’s Providence and humility as finite creatures who don’t always know why things are happening or what the intended results might be.
Peter—and the Bible as a whole—ground God’s trustworthiness not only in His Sovereignty and Power but also in his Goodness and Care. In verse seven there are four simple but significant words for why we should cast our anxieties on God: because “he cares for you.”[2] God pairs the magnificence of his Sovereignty with the goodness of his Love. In a parallel passage from Matthew 6:25-24, Jesus roots his command to not be anxious in the connected realities that God knows what we need and he cares or values us (v. 26). Thus, our fears are assuaged by knowing God is strong enough to handle any storm and good enough to care for us in the midst of it.[3]
Returning to the exhortation to humility from verse 6, this is important because in verse 7 the phrase “casting all your anxieties on him” (ESV) is a clause following on the heels of humble yourselves. Unlike how it might read in the NIV translation (“cast all…”), this is not a new verb but a participle explaining how we humble ourselves. This might initially catch us off guard since we don’t think of carrying burdens in the forms of worry or fear qualifies as pride. But, the Bible always gets the diagnosis right and reveals the heart issue at work, and here it is our pride. We carry burdens because we either think we have too or because we’re capable, neither of which are true. Rather than resisting God’s hand or striving to take care of things independently of him, we’re given the freedom to be honest about how small and weak we feel and trust in the bigness of God as God. The reason we don’t let go of worry, fear, shame, and stress is because we’re trying to carry responsibilities we’re not meant to carry. God brings struggles into our lives not so we can prove how strong and competent we are but so we’ll see how strong and competent He is. As our vision adjusts and we realize how small and weak we are we’re at the same time awakened to just how large and strong God is, and that He is those things for us.
The Meaning of Casting
Hopefully having seen a little bit more clearly the relationship between casting our cares and taking on humility, we can briefly define what “casting” means before describing how we might do it. Most of us don’t use the word “cast” in day to day conversations but it’s familiar enough we understand it. Some of the definitions and synonyms include throwing something off or away from you, to redirect, to let go of, or to put something away. When someone casts a fishing line they let it fly. The word in I Peter 5:7 appears one other place in the NT, Luke 19:35. When a colt (donkey) is brought to Jesus for his “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem, it says “throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it.” They take their cloaks and cast—throw or toss—them from their own backs and onto the back of the donkey.
Definitions are helpful in providing parameters to a word but illustrations put a picture in our mind. If fishing or riding donkeys isn’t your thing then here’s one that helps me. In every sport there is the possibility of injury. For example, in football, it seems like every few minutes there’s a TV timeout because of an injury. How many times have you seen someone severely injures their ankle, foot, or leg? What happens is they’re not strong enough to walk off on their own so teammates pick them up and do the walking for them. As the injured player leans—casts himself—onto his teammate and takes the weight off his own legs, the stronger teammate carries the weight for him. All of these definitions and illustrations convey a simple idea. Casting suggests taking something off of yourself and placing or throwing it onto something or someone else. Therefore, when we cast our cares on God we throw the burdens we’re carrying on our weak and worn-down backs onto God’s sturdy and unbending shoulders.
The “how-to” of Casting
While the explanation of casting isn’t all that difficult, the doing of it can be. If burdens were physical things it would be easy to transfer them to someone else. But, since burdens aren’t physical and since God isn’t standing next to me what how do I cast my cares on Him? Casting our burdens on God is an act of faith. When something is an act of faith it is no less real despite it being something that isn’t necessarily done physically.
Hopefully the explanation above has already provided more clarity as to what it means to cast our cares on God and how it might happen. We do it by humbling ourselves before God and giving up trusting in ourselves and controlling our own lives, and instead, we let God be in control and we place our trust in him.[4] We give him our worries, fears, shame, guilt, stress, despair, and control. We don’t deny how hard a situation is, we don’t hide behind feigned smiles and crossed fingers, and we don’t resort to a fatalistic mantra of “whatever will be, will be.” Instead, we’re honest about how hard things are and how much we’re struggling under the weight of it while simultaneously asking God for his help. We learn to trust Him to take care of us, to keep us trusting, to help us endure, to and learn of Him and from Him in the midst of these unwanted circumstances. We keep working and praying but the weight of responsibility is transferred from us to God. It’s no longer up to us to figure it out, fix it, clean things up, or make things right.
Attitudes, affections, and actions all overlap here. Humbling ourselves before God and under his mighty hand requires a change of attitude: God is God and I am not. It also provokes a change in our affections: I should and will trust in my Almighty and Loving God. The turn-around in our actions might just be new attitudes and affections, but it also might be demonstrated externally in our behavior: I will pray instead of worrying or fretting.[5]
To say it differently, burdens in the Bible are different and yet comparable to how we might think about and respond to gifts. God gives us gifts in part as avenues of creating gratitude in our heart that leads to giving thanks to God. The gift from God is given back as gratitude to God. Similarly, God gives us burdens in part as avenues of creating dependence in our heart that leads to trusting God. The burden from God is given back as trust to God.
Take the example of worry, which has family ties with fear and control. We worry, fret, and stress out because we don’t know what’s going to happen or if things will turn out okay. We can’t control the situation and we don’t know what’s next around the bend. But, only God can know the future and only God can control the lives and circumstances of people. If God is not real in my life or cannot be trusted either because a lack of might or lack of goodness then I will try to take his place. That’s all worrying is, acting as if God doesn’t know or can’t control the future so I better figure it out and handle my business. We cast our burden of worry on God by trusting He has a good plan for our lives and will carry us through whatever struggle he brings to us.
Worry isn’t the only burden we carry. Don’t we needlessly carry alone fear, guilt, shame, and sorrows? We’re paralyzed by fear of what might happen instead of trusting God as Helper in whatever comes our way. We hold onto guilt and shame when Jesus—the only judge of who’s guilty and what’s unclean—says your sins and stains have been washed by my perfect blood. We break under despairing sorrow instead of grieving as those who still have hope. Like most Christians, at times I’m tempted to hold onto all these different burdens but for me fear is usually the one I most struggle to let go of. I fear the future. I fear something happening to the people I love. I fear rational and irrational dangers. I have to continually massage the Scriptures back into my heart so that I trust in God more than I fear the “mights and coulds” in my head. It’s not that I say hard things won’t happen or there’s nothing to fear, since neither is promised to me. But rather, it’s knowing that I can’t figure out or change the things coming down the pipeline and then believing that my perfectly loving and perfectly strong God has a good plan for me. I trust He knows what He’s doing and He cares for me in doing it. As I trust, I let my tight grip on figuring out and controlling fear go and grip onto God himself as my security.
Trusting is living as the Father’s child. Most of us as adults now nostalgically remember our largely carefree lives as children. As a child you’re not supposed to have worries because your parents bear all of your worries. A child is—or at least should be—carefree because their parents love them, provide for them, and know what’s best. The child doesn’t fret about mortgages and new clothes because their parents will take care of them. Oh that we would be the children of God marked by trust in a perfect Father who loves us, provides for us, protects us, and cares for us.
Objections to Casting
If you think like me then there’s always a “but what about” or “but I feel like.” Despite all that is true above and even despite our experiences—which we forget—of those truths why don’t we cast our cares on God? What are the reasons we’re hesitant to entrust them to God? The first answer has already been noted: we take God’s place and try to run our own lives. Saying we get into trouble when we try to take God’s place isn’t meant to be harsh but to be honest. The lie that we can be like God has been the snare in our lives since the garden. I daily need to check myself with the reminder that God is God and I am not…so act like it.
In addition to idolatry and pride, I think there are some unstated whispers in the back of our mind that make us slow to cast our cares on God. It’s always a matter of belief, not so much the truths we mentally assent too but letting those truths permeate our hearts until they become our gut reaction. Instead of giving God our burdens because we trust “his mighty hand” (I Peter 5:6) and “he cares for us” (I Peter 5:7) we often listen to lies from self or Satan. The problem is we listen to the wrong voices instead of telling or preaching to ourselves what God has already said. Satan’s common lies designed to keep us carrying our own burdens usually make us thing wrongly of ourselves—as if we’re like God—and wrongly of God—as if he’s like us.[6] Satan will whisper, “The Father doesn’t love you or doesn’t care about you.” He will do everything to make you think, “Your sins can’t be forgiven and you’re guilty” or “you will never change and you’re still the same old you.” This is why go back to the Bible and anchor ourselves in the truths that God is both Sovereign and Caring, that Jesus has paid for all of our sins and taken our guilt, and that the Spirit has been given to gradually change us into new people by his power.
When it comes to listening to our own selves (which might also be influenced by whispers by Satan) I find that the following are our most common reasons we don’t give our burdens over.
God doesn’t care, He isn’t good, or He’s disappointed
God isn’t big enough, the situation is too large or too daunting or too far gone
God doesn’t listen to me or doesn’t know what’s going on.
I got myself into it so it’s up to me now, or I’ve used up all my second chances.
All of these thoughts are based on our subjective failings and not God’s objective truth. Our feelings are like waves that toss us back and forth but God’s Word is rock-solid and unshakeable ground. We will trust and cast our cares on God as we believe the truths about Him shown to us in the Bible. He does care for us. He invites us to come to him with our burdens, our struggles, our sorrow, and our sins. He is powerful enough and strong enough to handle anything. He has a good plan and good purposes for us. He doesn’t want us to figure things out or handle it on our own. In fact, he wants us to give up on self-sufficiency and lean on him alone.
Dig deep enough in the Word that you have truth to push back against the whispering lies of Satan and the deceptive thoughts from self. The cycle is that we speak these truths to ourselves and silence the lies, which allows us to trust God as we cast our cares on him, which in turn convinces us through experience what we believed as truth. The cycle gets stronger and deeper then as we’re led back into the Scriptures to see him more clearly and to trust him to a greater extent. What we usually then find is that the issue wasn’t primarily about the struggle or the trial itself. The issue behind our issues was whether or not we would run our lives or if we would be children who trust in their Father.
Obviously not everything could be said that I would like to say. The explanations could be clearer and deeper. If time permitted we might look at the number of OT heroes who trusted in God as they endured through many hardships. Or, we might look at the life of Jesus and how time and time again he in all his compassion released people from the burdens they carried. We might even go to Galatians 6:2 and see how Christians play a role in carrying one another’s burdens. While not exhaustive, my hope is that this short study puts us on solid footing as we think in more detail about what it means to cast all our cares on Him and then how we might go about doing it. I wanted to close with some wise and encouraging words by Charles Spurgeon.
“Why do you continue to stagger beneath a weight your Father would not even feel? What may seem to be a crushing burden to you would not amount to the weight of a speck of dust to him.
O child of suffering, be patient. Your sovereign God has not passed over or forgotten you. He who feeds the sparrows will also provide everything you need. Don’t give up in despair—hope on! Hope forever! Use the weapons of faith against the seas of trouble and ultimately your foes will be defeated and your distress will come to an end.
There is One who cares for you. His eye is fixed upon you, His heart beats with pity for your suffering, and His omnipotent hand will not fail to provide you help. Even the darkest storm cloud will be scattered into showers of mercy and the darkest night will give way to the morning sun.
If you are a member of His family, He will bind your wounds and heal your broken heart. Never doubt His grace because of the troubles in your life, but believe He loves you just as much during the seasons of trouble as in times of happiness.” [7]
I’d also recommend this video by Tim Timmons where he sings “Cast Your Cares.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCabdAAy7-M&feature=share&list=RDbyWYXGD7laI&index=1
Footnotes:
Top image found at: http://www.worshiphousemedia.com/worship-tracks/15036/Cast-Your-Cares
[1] Other primary texts in mind would be Ps. 55:22; Matt. 6:25-34, 11:28-30; Gal. 6:2; Also, compare James 4:6-7, 10 with I Peter 5:5-9.
[2] “But this fear arises from our ignorance of divine providence. Now, on the other hand, as soon as we are convinced that God cares for us, our minds are easily led to patience and humility….having cast our care on God, we may calmly rest. For all those who recumb [rest] not on God’s providence must necessarily be in constant turmoil and violently assail others. We ought the more to dwell on this thought, that God cares for us.” John Calvin, The First Epistle of Peter, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 22 of Calvin’s Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 149.
[3] “Giving our anxiety to God makes eminent sense ‘because he cares for you.’ God is not indifferent, nor is he cruel. He has compassion on his children and will sustain them in every distress.” Thomas Schreiner, The New American Commentary: 1, 2 Peter, Jude (Nashville: Broadman & Holdman, 2003), 241.
[4] “It is rather a trusting commitment to God in the assurance that God indeed cares and that his caring does not lack the power or the will to do the very best for his own.” Peter H. Davids, The First Epistle of Peter NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 188.
[5] In the NT, encouragement to prayer is often tied to trusting in God instead of stewing in anxiety. See Philippians 4:4-7.
[6] Look at I Peter 5:6-11 and James 4:4-6, 10—which parallel one another in multiple ways—where resisting the devil is tied to humbly submitting ourselves and trusting God.
[7] Charles Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, ed. by Jim Reimann (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008) 6. http://www.spurgeon.org/morn_eve/this_morning.cgi
The King James Version translates 1 Thessalonians 5:22 as “abstain from all appearance of evil.” While studying verses 16-22 in preparation of a sermon I came across this quote from Gary Shogren. Having been raised in a church culture where the appearance of holiness rivaled actual holiness, his remarks were a helpful antidote to obsession with any “appearance” of evil we might give off. Obviously this could be taken too far if we exercise no cautious wisdom at all when it comes to appearances of sin that might be detrimental, but his words are still worth considering.
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