Humble And Alert – 1 Peter 5
The final of five sessions at Lee Abbey 2026
How would I score my life so far, out of ten?
That’s the question I found myself asking as I prepared the last sermon in our Lee Abbey series, and it isn’t a fair one. Most of us didn’t get the version of our lives we planned as eighteen-year-olds. Illness, broken relationships, kids making spectacularly poor decisions, financial setbacks, that’s just what it means to live in the real world, and none of it is a verdict on your worth.
I found the redemption of that question in a story I love, about a man most people have never heard of. Alphonsus Rodriguez was born in Spain in 1533. By forty he’d lost his wife and all three of his children, watched his business collapse, and tried to join a Jesuit monastery only to be turned down as too old and uneducated. Instead he spent the next four decades as a doorkeeper at a Jesuit college, no promotion, no ordination, nothing to show for it by any measure most of us use. Every time the bell rang, he’d say, “I’m coming, Lord,” and welcome whoever was on the other side as though it were Christ himself.
One of the brilliant young men who passed through that door was Pierre Claver, who asked seventy two year old Alphonsus to disciple him. Claver went on to spend his life caring for enslaved people in South America and was later canonised as “the slave to the slaves.” Rome eventually canonised Alphonsus too, not for anything he achieved, but for a life of humility and hospitality nobody was watching.
Humble. 1 Peter 5 puts it starkly: “God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble.” Opposed by God, that’s not a phrase I want to breeze past. C.S. Lewis has the sharpest line on this: the first step to humility is realising you’re proud, and if you don’t think you are, that’s the proof that you are. There’s a promise attached, though: “Humble yourselves under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time.” I told the congregation about Pastor Ralph in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, who fasted and prayed for a building his ministry couldn’t afford, and received it, gift by gift, including a bag of gold bars from a stranger who’d been holding onto it for twenty four years. Nobody has less of God than they want!
Alert. The second half of the chapter turns to vigilance: “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” I love how ageing lions actually hunt. An old, weaker lion roars from upwind while the younger lions hide downwind, so the herd panics and runs straight into the jaws waiting for them. That’s why Paul’s answer in Ephesians 6 isn’t retreat but armour, and why I closed with Smith Wigglesworth’s charge: live ready. Not “get ready when trouble comes”, by then it’s too late.
This was the last of five sessions where I preached at Lee Abbey this year, and it felt like the right note to end on. Not a formula, just a doorkeeper nobody promoted, and an invitation to be humble enough to be used and alert enough to stand firm.
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