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! Winning over Worry
In the awareness of His control and our lack of it, I think, we can alleviate our debilitating worry....
"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?
"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not much more valuable than they?
Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
"And why do you worry about clothes?
See how the lilies of the field grow.
They do not labor or spin.
Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.
If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
"So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?'
For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.
Each day has enough trouble of its own."
Matthew 6:25-34
Several summers ago, my family and I were on the Greek island of Naxos in the Aegean Sea.
We had to take an eight-hour ferryboat ride through choppy waters to get there.
The moment we set foot on the dock, though, we noticed a very strange sight Everywhere we looked, there were Greek men nervously fingering strings of beads—worry beads, they called them.
There were old men fingering worry beads, middle-aged men fumbling with worry beads, and young men fidgeting with worry beads.
We saw them on the coast and we saw them as we moved farther into the interior of the island—worry beads were everywhere!
The island was such a beautiful place we couldn't see what they all had to worry about.
Then an interesting thing happened.
We wanted to take some sort of souvenir home with us to Texas—and we decided the only appropriate one would be worry beads.
But the more we thought about it, the more we began to worry about what kind of beads we ought to get....
There were different colors, different sizes, different strings that made different sounds.
We were worrying about worry beads!
Everyone worries.
It's the favorite American pastime.
If we don't worry, we're probably worried that we aren't worried.
And if we worry, we surely worry that we worry too much.
At the age of four, we worry about a dark room.
At thirteen, we worry that we won't fit in at a party.
As parents, we worry about our children.
The young executive, who has spent days preparing a presentation that will affect his future, worries what the boss will think.
A factory worker reads of cutbacks in the defense industry and worries how it will affect his job.
All of us wrestle with worry.
It's so much a part of our lives, so much a drain on our energy and attitudes, that Jesus devoted one-seventh of the Sermon on the Mount, the most famous sermon in history, to the subject.
Evidently He believed that coming to grips with worry was of great significance for our lives.
He devoted one word out of seven in this landmark sermon to how we can be liberated from it.
What do you think are the greatest concerns of living?
Jesus recognized that we seem to be more concerned about the body that supports our life—what we'll put in it, what we'll put on it, and how we'll sustain it.
But Jesus' response to these concerns is short, simple, and very, very true: We can stop our perpetual worry about these daily anxieties when we give ourselves to life's greatest concern—the reign and rule of God within us.
How is that so?
To make His point very clear, Jesus gave us a command to heed, an argument to understand, and some illustrations to explain.
!! A Command to Heed
The command He gave us was this:
"Take no heed of what you will eat or what you will drink or what you will put on your body."
In other words, stop worrying about this "secular trinity" that we make so all-important.
Three times in the Sermon on the Mount He speaks of these three areas of life: what we will eat, what we will drink, and what we will put on.
This materialistic trinity can consume all our thoughts.
If we kept a worry list for seven days, most of our worries would fall into one of these three basic categories.
In King James language, we'd say, "Take no heed."
Today, we'd say, "Quit being so distracted with anxiety."
The word "worry" in the Greek means literally to tear apart, to distract, to come apart at the seams of a garment.
And the grammatical construction Jesus used in these words tells us that the people to whom He was speaking were habitually, perennially, torn apart by anxious care.
"Stop being so torn apart by worry over the basics of life," He was actually saying.
It's not foresight He's prohibiting, but /foreboding,/ not necessary preparation and planning, but constant, useless anxiety.
But it's all easier said than done, isn't it?
Stop worrying!
For many of us, that's like saying, "Stop breathing!"
I read a little poem the other day.
It went:
"I've joined the new 'Don't Worry Club'
And now I hold my breath.
I'm so afraid I'll worry
That I'm worried most to death."
!!
An Argument to Understand
But Jesus must have understood that it's never enough to simply tell us to stop worrying.
He didn't just give this bare command to stop being anxious about the basics of life, but He showed us how by giving us a very logical, spiritual argument.
There is a secret, you see, to winning over worry.
And that secret is grasping a "Lordly logic"....
Let's examine the "Lordly logic" of Jesus.
He said that God's greater gifts always include His lesser gifts, too.
He seems to be asking three questions: "Do you believe that God gave you the great gift of life and that He gave you a body to sustain it?
And did your worry have anything to do with that gift?
And can your worry improve that gift?"
And then, He makes His point: "Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?" (Matt.
6:25).
Jesus often used a technique of teaching from the higher value to the lower one, and it never works better than it does here.
The device makes us see the situation through His mind.
We begin to see how futile, even silly, much of our worry is.
For instance, have you ever thought about this: when we were at the most vulnerable moment of our entire lives—those months before we were born—we not only didn't worry, we couldn't worry.
And yet we were born.
He gave us that gift of life.
Why would He give us that greater gift if He were not going to give us what we needed to sustain it?
God doesn't do things halfway.
He's not that kind of God.
Did you ever see half a mountain?
Or half an ocean?
He gave us a world full of life and eyes to see it.
He gave us a world full of knowledge and minds to comprehend it.
And as Romans 8:32 reminds us, "He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?"
If God gave us that great gift, surely He can be trusted to sustain us with the basics of life for as long as we live.
Job 14:5 says, "Man's days are determined."
We must understand that fact We don't know that number.
But I believe God wants us to grasp that for the lifetime determined for us, He will give us everything we need for our bodies.
In the awareness of /His/ control and our lack of it, I think, we can alleviate our debilitating worry.
Just a little readjusting of our perspective makes His Lordly logic ours.
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