What Would Jesus Say About Worry?

Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

A friend of mine, a chaplain, returned from Iraq just a couple of months ago.  It’s a really odd experience going from war, to just a few hours later coming back to here, where only other people driving cars are out to get you.  But he was talking about that kind of thing.  He said, “You know what?  You know what I found when I first got back here?  When I’d get in my car and I’d go out and drive around and suddenly I had to stop at a stop light and I was surrounded by cars and I was just sitting there, I would get so anxious; because in Iraq if you’re in a car, stopped, you’re a target.”  He said it really bothered him initially and he went and got counseling.  The counselor said, “You know what?  It’s perfectly normal.  Everybody feels this way.”  It was kind of, if you want to put it this way, like a word of knowledge. It was just information that helped him.  I just got back from a conference of Army chaplains, and we had a guy from the V.A. who was telling us about some of the things that they’re doing for some of the veterans, even veterans from Viet Nam who’ve come back, who suffered from some things for thirty years.  They go and talk to a counselor and the counselor says “What you’re going through is normal.”  The people have been known to say “I wish somebody told me that thirty years ago.” 

Well today I want to take that approach to the subject of worry.  I want to talk about what Jesus has to say about worry, about what the bible has to say about worry, because worry’s a problem for all of us.  Almost everybody I know is anxious at one time in their life, probably a lot, maybe every day.  It was a problem for the people of Jesus’ time too.  So let’s begin by hearing the word as it comes to us from Matthew and then talking about what Jesus has to say about worry.

This is a familiar passage; you’ve all heard it before.  Matthew 6:25-34.

Jesus says, “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.”

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Would you pray with me?

 O Father we are anxious people, and we ask your help.  We pray that the word we hear today would help us in dealing in our lives and understanding worry and understanding how to deal with it.  Be with us now Lord as we hear the word and I pray that you would touch each one of us in our hearts and minds.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

I have something to show you and while it’s warming up, I’ll tell you a story, a story out of Texas.  Two young boys, playmates, you know how young boys are, they pretend to be things; and these two boys loved to be Texas Rangers.  They lived out on a farm.  One day one of their moms said “Why don’t you boys go down to the chicken house and roust out the snake down there that’s wreaking havoc among the chickens.  So they got on their brooms and rode down to the chicken house.  They began to go through and looked at the shelves, you know.  On the lower level they couldn’t find the snake.  They looked on the medium level and couldn’t find the snake.  So they got a little stool out and got up on one and looked up on the top level, and there, staring them in the face, was a chicken snake.  Well they got so scared they stumbled all over each other and they literally burst out the door, knocking it off its hinges getting out.  Well the mom was watching all this and kind of laughed and when they got up to the house she said, “Boys, don’t you know that chicken snakes can’t hurt you?”  They said, “Well sometimes there are things that scare you so bad you hurt yourself.”  I like that.  There are a lot of things in life that are like that, that scare us so bad they hurt us. 

Worry is that way.  There are a lot of doctors who believe that half the hospitals are filled with people who basically either have an emotional problem or a mental problem.  Now they may have physical sicknesses, but they believe that a lot of those things are caused by the stress that we feel and the worry that we have.  Worry is a big problem.  So what does Jesus say about it?  I’m not going to worry about this not working.  (Laughter)   Actually I have my little cheat sheet so that’ll help.  I usually intend on putting a little study guide in your bulletin and I didn’t get it, so I was going to make up for it by putting it on the screen.  So I’ll just have to read it to you.  It’s organized around words.  We talked about first a word of information or knowledge how that can help us deal with worry or anything.  Sometimes if we just know what’s going on it helps us.  The second one is what I would call a word of community.  You know in our American society we are individualists.  We have what we might call a John Wayne syndrome:  We are going to handle it by ourselves.  We are Lone Rangers riding out into the sunset.  “Hi-Yo, Silver, Away!”  I’m going to take care of it.  We say that to ourselves and then we isolate ourselves from one another.  The friends that we do need are me and my friend alcohol, or prescription drugs or sometimes addictions to television or whatever.  We look for ways to help us deal with the stress; but we can’t do that.  We need one another.  You know one of the wonderful things about Faith Church, I did a survey a couple of years ago and you scored way off the charts in your sense of community and helping one another.  That’s great.  You know, when we worry, when we are having problems, the best thing we can do is seek out help and then give it, putting our arm around each other and saying “You know, I’m here for you.”  A word of community.

We also need a word about the past.  You know it is interesting to me at how we let the past destroy our present.  I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find myself thinking about what I’ve done in the past, you know.  Maybe it was something I did when I was seventeen, or twenty; many years ago, many years ago.  “Oh I wish I’d done that differently!” or “How could I’ve been so stupid!”  Have you ever done that?  We allow what’s happen in the past and we feel guilty about it. or we have resentments that we kind of chew on and, you know, people that we can’t forgive.  That’s why Jesus talks about forgiveness all the time, about forgiving others and forgiving ourselves.  That’s the whole message of the cross.  Jesus died for our sins, they were in the past.  The bible is very clear about what the past is.  It is something to learn from but never something to live in.  The same is true about the future.  The future destroys our present sometimes, because we are wondering what’s going to happen.  Kind of like what Mark Twain once said, when he had grown older, he said, “I’m an old man now and have seen many troubles, most of which never happened.” 

Many years ago now I had what I would have to call a mid-life crisis and I decided I needed to go to Army airborne school.  That’s where you learn to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.  When you go down to Fort Benning, Georgia and you get involved in that training, they do P.T. with you bright and early, actually O’Dark-Thirty, as they call it.  They do P.T. and then you go for a run.  You do this all week.  I went in my late 30’s, most everybody else was in their twenties.  By the time I got to Friday, I was tired.  The problem is that on Friday they run you longer.  The rule is that if you don’t make the run, if you drop out, they resend your orders and you go home.  Well, I knew this.  Do you ever get a stitch in your side?  Right off the bat I got a stitch in my side and I was in great pain.  I wound up dropping out and they sent me home.  It was embarrassing.  But you know what made me stop?  It wasn’t the pain.  It was the thought that if it hurts as much now, what’s it going to be like next week, when the runs are longer?  It was the thought of what the future held that made me give up.  Now, as God’s providence had it, I was able to get orders to go back.  Friday came, and guess what; the same pain.  But I learned something.  I said to myself, “Self, Chris, you can’t worry about next week.  You’ve got to get through today”; and I made it, barely.  But I made it and you know what?  Next week wasn’t so bad.  We let the future destroy the present.  Sometimes we burden ourselves and it’s like a weight on the back and on our minds of all the things that might happen.  Now Jesus isn’t saying “Don’t plan for the future.”  But He is saying you can’t control the future.  You have somebody who does control the future.  His name is God.

So we need a word about the past and the future.  Now right away as we talk about this, you might have an objection in your mind.  “Aren’t I supposed to worry about things?  Aren’t I supposed to worry about doing my job and about my children and about making a living and all those things out there?”  Well there’s a powerful distinction I want you to understand.  That’s a distinction between worry and concern.  Now, it’s a subtle one, in the bible, in a Greek word, it’s the same word: worry and concern; but there’s a huge difference between the two.  Concern is in the context of yes, there are lots of things we ought to concern ourselves with, how we do our work, how we take care of our jobs.  God has given us duties to do and we are concerned about doing those things when we ought to be.  But it is always in the context that God is right there with us, doing our work with us, helping us; and it’s in the context of faith.  There really are things we should be concerned about.  I remember raising my teenaged girls; and, if they were still teenagers today, they’re kind of past that now, but if one of them showed up with a boy who had a tattoo on his face that said “I am the anti-Christ,” I’d be concerned.  But worry is always done without faith.  When we worry about things we’re assuming that it all happens by chance.  I’m not in control, or I am control.  If you’re in control, you are in deep trouble.  You ought to be worried.  There is a huge difference.  So we are to be responsible, but not worried.

There is also a word about treasures.  We have already talked about this.  Where is your treasure?  Again I ask, where is your treasure?  What do you value the most?  Last week I used the illustration of a fantasy of having a genie that gives you three wishes, what would your wish for?  Well I read another one about a man who had three wishes and it was pretty easy for the first two.  He wanted an eighty thousand dollar Ferrari and “Poof” there it was.  Twenty million dollars.  Poof, there it was.  He was having a hard time with the third one though.  He sat there and thought and a little tune ran through his head.  Pretty soon he was singing that tune and it went something like this.  “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener.” (Laughter)  Poof!  You know if we would examine ourselves we would find out where our treasures are.  The problem with stuff, whatever it is, is it always goes away.  It always rusts.  It always deteriorates.  Everything in this world deteriorates.  All we have to do is look in the mirror to find that out.  It may seem kind of slow, but it happens.  Yet our treasures are often our bank accounts and our things.  What we spend the most on, time and money, is stuff.  It’s no wonder we’re anxious; because the more stuff we have, the more we have to take care of it, the more we have to fix it, the more we have to worry about it.  Where is your treasure?

Then Jesus addresses two things which psychologists tell us that every human being is concerned about.  One is security.  He addresses that by saying, “Don’t worry about it.  Don’t worry about your life.”  Don’t worry about your life.  What you’re going to eat.  What you’re going to drink.  Who owns you?  Is your life your own?  You might say, “Well of course it is.  I can do anything with my life that I want to.”  Well, yeah, sure, but really?  None of us had anything to do with being here.  We just showed up.  Through the agency of our parents and mostly because of God’s creation, we’re here.  I remember my mother telling me some things that I swore I would never do to my children.  You know how that is, your parents tell you things and shake their finger at you.  “I’ll never do that.”  But wind up doing it.  My mother used to say to me things like, and things in this particular context was having something to do with the car, and she said “Driving is a privilege, not a right.”  My children can tell you that I’ve used that many times.  Life is a privilege and not a right.  In the end we will all stand before God and God will ask us what we did with it.  If you really owned your life, who is going to judge you for it?  Certainly no one here; but someone will.  If you think your life is your own, no wonder you’re anxious. No wonder you’re worried.  You should be worried.  It’s like I said a minute ago, if you think you’re in control, you are in deep trouble.  I know I am.

What is the significance of life?  What is really real?  We all want to make a difference.  We all want to be thought of well.  We all want to be significant.  What’s the world’s idea of significance?  Making it on American Idol?  It’s not only that we have clothes, but what kind of clothes we wear.  If you are not wearing the right things, you’re not in, if you’re not like one of the models strutting down the runway or dressed like Donald Trump; and in the world that’s true.  You aren’t dressed well, you’re not in.  God’s idea of significance is totally different.  His significance is what are you doing for Him and His righteousness and His kingdom, because that’s what we are going to be asked about.  And there’s a promise here.  “Seek first the kingdom and all those things will be yours as well.”  You may not be rich but you’ll be fed and you’ll have something to wear.  The promise is there.  If we have our priority straight, God will take care of us.

Next to last there is a word about prayer.  Later in the bible Paul says this, “Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”  If you want to know how to deal with worry, pray.  It’s interesting.  It’s not just any prayer.  Prayer with thanksgiving.  In other words, as we pray we thank God ahead of time for taking care of the things that we need.  In other words we pray in faith, saying you’ve got it; it’s O.K.  We will get what we need.  God doesn’t always give us what we want, that’s true.  You know I look back on my own life and I am very glad I didn’t get all the stuff I asked for.  I don’t know about you.  Because basically I don’t know what I really need; but God does.  Prayer is part of the answer to dealing with anxiety because prayer does a lot of things.  It connects us with God.  It gives us confidence that somebody bigger than us knows what’s going on and can help us and will guide us.  Prayer with thanksgiving, and then with that comes peace, the promise of peace.  He’s not talking about a peace that’s irrational; He’s talking about a peace that is beyond our own understanding.  There’s a big difference there.

And last but not least there is a word about faith.  There’s a little phrase tucked into this passage which I think actually is the synopsis of it all, “You of little faith.”  Now I realize that worry and anxiety can be caused by lots of different things.  Sometimes there are chemical imbalances; sometimes there are psychological problems; sometimes there’s this and sometimes there’s that.  But a lot of the worry we experience is basically because we have very little faith.  When we’re worried, we are not really trusting God.  When we have super anxiety, we are not really trusting God.  I want to just challenge you today.  Not literally, because there’s no room; but in your hearts, in your minds.  Get down on your knees and say to God, “I need your help.  I’m worried about this or that.”  Just give those things to Him.  Oswald Chambers said, “Often our unbelief comes from the suspicion that God is not good.”  Our unbelief comes from the suspicion that God is not good.  In other words, deep down inside we believe that God either ignores us or doesn’t care or really isn’t going to take care of it the way we want to; so we feel like we have to do it ourselves.  No wonder we’re anxious.  No wonder. 

Pray now.  Give God your worry.

Let us pray.  Father I admit my own anxiety.  Oh some days Lord I have good days and I don’t worry about anything; but, sometimes they just seem to come, this or that.  I ask your help for it.  I ask your help for myself and all of us Lord that we may place our worries before you.  We’ve heard about this peace that passes understanding but we don’t experience it.  We ask your help.  We’d like to be able to not worry about our lives Lord but it seems like that’s what we do a lot of.  How we pay our bills. How we deal with sickness.  How we deal with raising our children, helping our parents.  We ask your help Lord.  We love you and praise you, and we thank you that you love us.  We pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen.