I cast my cares on God, and those cares keep finding their way back to me. So how do I get rid of those cares for good? We get that question a lot. Today it comes in the form of an email from a listener to the podcast named Claire. Claire writes, “Hello, Pastor John and Tony! I’m a Christian college student and I listen to APJ all the time. Pastor John, I was recently rereading your book Battling Unbelief. In the first chapter, you mention 1 Peter 5:7 and that we should be ‘casting our cares on God.’ I have often wondered about this command and how you do it. How do you cast your cares? Do you simply tell God you’re giving up your worries? Additionally, once you do cast them, are we expected to forget those worries? Or can we expect them to come back to us?” Pastor John, what would you say to Claire?
Suppose you lived in a village with about five hundred people and no army, no fortress, and suppose you heard that an enemy army of five thousand armed soldiers was coming against you to take your village and destroy its inhabitants. Now, that would be in your heart a burden. It would be an anxiety, and the kind of thing Peter says in 1 Peter 5:7 should be cast on the Lord, right? “Cast your anxieties onto the Lord.” Or Psalm 55:22: “[Roll] your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you. He will never permit the righteous to be moved.”
And suppose that there was a king, with an army of fifty thousand soldiers, who had pledged himself to protect you and your village when you call him for help. So you send a messenger to the king and plead with him to come and protect you against the enemy, and he sends a royal messenger back with a message with the official king’s seal on it that says, “I will protect you. The enemy will not overwhelm you.” Signed, “The King.” Now, what would it mean for you at that moment to cast your burden, to cast your anxiety, onto the king?
Surely, the answer is this: to the degree that you trust the king’s promise to protect you, to that degree, your burden will be lifted. If your trust is small, you will still feel burdened, but if your trust is great, your burden will be light. So the key to casting your burdens, your anxieties, onto the king is to trust the word of the king, the word of promise, which, of course, includes trusting that he has the power to do what he says he’ll do, that he has the wisdom to be as strategic as he needs to be, that he has the will, or the desire, or the commitment to do what he says. Trust will involve all those things, but trust is the key to letting your burden go, putting your burden on the king.
