Not Home Yet

What an older Peter learned about leading, surrendering, and standing firm, and what it means for us.

There are, in a sense, two men named Peter in the New Testament, and they are the same man.

The first is the one most of us picture. Impulsive. Loud. Overconfident. The disciple who stepped out of the boat and then sank, who swore he would die before he denied his Lord and then denied him three times before the rooster crowed. Bold faith and self-reliance, braided together, fraying under pressure.

The second Peter writes 1 Peter. And by the time you reach the fifth chapter of his letter, he sounds like a different man. Steady. Gentle. Humble. Dependent on God. The same voice that once argued about who was greatest now says, lead humbly. The same hands that once reached for a sword in the garden now write, cast all your anxiety on him.

Nothing about that transformation was Peter's achievement. It was the gospel's work in him. And that is the first thing this final chapter of his letter wants us to see: the gospel does not merely save people. It reshapes them. The God who was not finished with Peter is not finished with you.

If you have ever looked at your own failures and wondered how God could possibly use you, Peter is your answer. He is the proof. God forms imperfect people, and sometimes it takes years.

Lead like a shepherd

Peter opens his final appeal to the church's leaders:

"So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock." (1 Peter 5:1–3)

Notice how Peter positions himself. He does not write as an apostle pulling rank. He calls himself a fellow elder, a co-shepherd who has suffered alongside them and who will share in the same glory. The man who once wanted position now lowers himself into the ranks. That posture is the whole point.

And it clarifies the promise that follows: "And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory" (5:4). Peter is not the chief Shepherd. Christ is. Peter is a shepherd only because he serves under the Shepherd of shepherds, and so is every leader after him. The staff in a shepherd's hand was never mainly a weapon. It was for guiding, drawing near, pulling the wandering sheep back to safety. Real shepherds knew their sheep by name, walked with them, stayed close. Biblical leadership is not control. It is care, and it is personal.

Now, Peter directs this to elders: pastors, overseers, the officially charged. We should not blur that. But the principle he draws from Christ's under-shepherds reaches wider than the eldership, because Scripture calls the whole church to build one another up (Colossians 3:16), to teach one another (Hebrews 5:12), to encourage one another daily (1 Thessalonians 5:11). If you are further along than someone, you are called to pour into them, and someone further along should be pouring into you. To be spiritually formed by no one and to form no one is to miss something God intends for you.

So here is the honest question: how do people experience your influence? Do they encounter pressure, ego, and the need to be right, or do they encounter Christ? Because leadership that is worth anything always points away from the leader and toward Jesus.

Peter can say this now only because life humbled him first. Which is exactly where he goes next.

Pride makes you sink

"Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for 'God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.' Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you." (1 Peter 5:5–6)

Clothe yourselves. Humility is not a temperament some people are born with. It is a garment you deliberately put on. It is a choice, made and remade daily.

And Peter says something sobering: God opposes the proud. Not merely overlooks. Opposes. Why would God set himself against the proud? Because pride is, at its root, the conviction that we do not need him. It whispers, I've got this. I can carry this on my own. Proverbs puts it plainly: "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall" (Proverbs 16:18). Left unchecked, self-sufficiency does not make us strong. It sets us up to sink.

No one knew this better than Peter, because he had lived it. In Matthew 14, he stepped out of the boat and walked on water toward Jesus: genuine, extraordinary faith. But then, Matthew tells us, "when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, 'Lord, save me'" (14:30). Jesus caught him and said, "O you of little faith, why did you doubt?" (14:31).

That scene is a picture of the whole man, and of most of us. The sinking came the moment Peter's gaze shifted from Christ to his circumstances. Fear and self-reliance turn out to be two faces of the same problem: eyes off Jesus, attention on the storm and on the self. Pride says, I've got this. Fear says, I can't survive this. Both stop looking at the One walking toward them across the water. Humility does the opposite: it keeps its eyes fixed on Christ and cries, Lord, save me.

That is why humility is not weakness, even though it feels like it. Humility is dependence. And many of us resist dependence with everything we have. Watch a drowning person, and you'll see it: the instinct, even as rescue arrives, is to fight the rescuer. We do the same thing spiritually. God reaches down to pull us out, and our first move is to thrash against the very hands that would save us.

Peter's counsel is the harder, better way: humble yourself under the mighty hand of God. Trust his leadership over your own. Trust his wisdom over your own. Trust his timing over your own. And then he tells us how.

Cast what you can't carry

"...casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you." (1 Peter 5:7)

Read that verse the way Peter wrote it. It is not a fresh, standalone command; it is grammatically bound to the one before it. Casting your anxiety on God is how you humble yourself under his hand. The two are one act. Pride hoards its worries and calls it strength; humility hands them over and calls it trust.

And notice what Peter does not say. He does not say pretend you're fine. He does not say bury it, ignore it, or perform composure you don't feel. He says cast it: throw it, release it, transfer the weight onto someone who can bear it. And not some of it. All of it.

This is Peter, who knew literal storms and literal fear, telling us the reason we can let go: because he cares for you. Not in theory. Not in the abstract. The God who cares proved it at the cross. He took on himself the weight we were never built to carry, so that we would not have to carry it alone. The peace this produces is not the absence of the storm. It is the presence of God inside the storm. Anxiety grows when we insist on carrying what was never ours to hold.

So what are you carrying that God is asking you to surrender? Your future. Your children. Your marriage. Your health. Your finances. Your fear. Cast it on him, because he cares for you.

We don't fight alone

But surrender is not the whole battle, because the battle is not only internal.

"Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world." (1 Peter 5:8–9)

Peter names an enemy, and he chooses his image carefully. A lion on the hunt does not charge the herd. It watches for the straggler (the isolated one, the animal that has drifted from the pack) and picks it off. That is precisely the enemy's strategy, and it exposes one of our most self-destructive instincts.

When we are struggling, failing, ashamed, or exhausted, the very first thing many of us do is withdraw. We decide the church is the last place we belong right now. We stop coming. We stop answering the texts from people who love us. We stop showing up to the group. We pull away from the exact community that would keep us safe, and we do it at the moment we are most exposed. "I just need some space," we tell ourselves. Sometimes that's true. But sometimes it is exactly what the lion is counting on.

Here Peter is worth taking seriously, because the church has too often under-taught this. We are good at telling people to give their anxiety to God. We are far less comfortable saying out loud that there is an adversary, and that real spiritual conflict runs underneath our ordinary lives. Paul was blunt about it: "We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness" (Ephesians 6:12). That means the tension in a relationship, the bitterness in a marriage, the discouragement that isolates us: these are rarely just what they appear. The person in front of you is not the enemy. The battle is spiritual, and it calls for spiritual weapons: sober-mindedness, prayer, and a faith that stands firm alongside others.

Which is why we do not fight alone. Peter roots our resistance in the "brotherhood throughout the world": we stand firm together. So ask yourself: who are your people? Who knows your struggles, prays for you, checks on you, and tells you the truth when you're tempted to drift? Isolation makes every spiritual battle harder. Community is how we stand.

God is still forming you

Then Peter ends not with a warning but with a promise, and it is one of the most hope-filled sentences in the New Testament:

"And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you." (1 Peter 5:10)

The God of all grace, not partial grace, not grace that runs out. And he does not merely patch us up and send us on. Peter stacks four verbs: restore, confirm, strengthen, establish. God himself is doing this work, and he is doing it in each of us. If you are in Christ, you are not a finished project or a lost cause. You are being formed.

And here is the wonder of it for Peter personally: the man writing about humility had watched it demonstrated. He had seen Jesus heal, forgive, and serve, but one night his Lord did something he never forgot.

The towel and the throne

John frames the moment with a startling line: "Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands..." (John 13:3). Stop there. In the moment John is about to describe, Jesus holds all authority. King of kings. Nothing outside his reach.

And because of that authority, not in spite of it, "he laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist" (13:4) and began to wash his disciples' feet. The task belonged to the lowest servant in the house, the newest hire, the one with no standing. And the One with the highest authority in the room knelt and took it.

Peter recoiled. "Lord, do you wash my feet?... You shall never wash my feet" (13:6, 8). It was pride, again: the same reflex that argued about greatness and swung a sword. Jesus answered, "If I do not wash you, you have no share with me" (13:8). And Peter, hearing it, swung to the other extreme: "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" (13:9).

That is the gospel in miniature. The King with all authority kneels and says, in effect: unless you humble yourself and let me wash you, you can have no part of me. And the sinner answers: then don't stop at my feet: wash my hands that carry my guilt, wash my head with all its wandering thoughts. Cleanse all of me. Grace does not begin until pride bends the knee.

This reframes even the boldest thing the New Testament says about our own power. Jesus told his followers, "I have given you authority... over all the power of the enemy" (Luke 10:19). The Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells in believers (Romans 8:11), and Paul prays that we would grasp "the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe" (Ephesians 1:19–20). That is real, and for a people who take the Spirit's power seriously, it is not to be minimized. But notice how Jesus modeled the exercise of authority: on his knees, with a towel. Delegated power, held in dependence on the Spirit, and spent in service, never in dominion over others. The disciple with the most authority uses it the way his Master did.

"I have given you an example," Jesus said, "that you also should do just as I have done to you" (John 13:15). And Paul echoes it: "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves" (Philippians 2:3), pointing to the Christ who "emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant" (2:7). Suddenly Peter's words make perfect sense. Clothe yourselves with humility, because Peter had watched Humility itself kneel down with a towel.

Not home, but not withdrawn

That is the thread running through the whole letter. Peter writes to "elect exiles" (1 Peter 1:1). This world is where we live, but it is not where we belong; we are just passing through. For chapter after chapter he has been reminding a suffering, discouraged church: stand firm, know who you are, love deeply, suffer with hope, live holy, serve faithfully, walk humbly.

But there is one thing Peter never says. He never says withdraw.

This is worth hearing, because "not home yet" can quietly curdle into disengagement, the temptation to stop investing because we know the story ends elsewhere. Peter refuses that move. He tells exiles to "keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that... they may see your good deeds and glorify God" (1 Peter 2:11–12). Exile is not retreat. It is faithful presence in a place that is not our home.

So we don't just stare at the clouds. We engage. The church was never meant to be a compartment of life, one drawer among many, kept carefully separate from how we work, how we love, how we vote, how we think. It was meant to be the center from which everything else takes its shape. Faith that has to "stay in its lane" is not the faith Peter is describing. He is describing people who belong to another kingdom and who therefore live differently, and more fully, in this one.

And here truth and love are not rivals to be balanced but one holistic call. Truth without love turns cold; love without truth turns hollow. Peter, of all people, held them together: the man who once told Jesus You shall never wash my feet is the same man who tells us to lay every burden at those same feet. He learned it the hard way, over the years, under the patient, formative hand of the God of all grace.

That God is not finished with you either. This is not your home. But while you are here: love deeply. Stand firm. Shepherd well. And do all of it on your knees, with a towel in your hand.