Transcription
Introduction
I want to invite you, if you will, to open in your New Testament to Matthew chapter 6. Matthew chapter 6 is where we will take our study from in just a moment. We’ll probably hit on a couple of passages before we get to that point, but that’s where we’re going to spend most of our time. And it’s good to see everybody here this morning. glad you are uh here to worship the Lord and to to look into his word and we hope that as we study for just a little bit that that’ll be something that is that is beneficial for you.
As we begin this morning, I want to I want you to think for a moment about what the hardest command in the New Testament is for you, for you personally. You have a lot of them to choose from. I mean, is it the command of Jesus to maybe turn the other cheek when someone has slapped you? Is it the command to go the the second mile with someone who has asked you to go one mile with them? Maybe it is the command to forgive someone, not just seven times, but 70* 7 that is difficult for you to follow through with.
And and there’s no doubt that each of these commandments set an extremely high standard for our conduct. And there’s no doubt that we struggle with each of them from time to time when we are called upon to put them into practice. But it seems to me that one of the most difficult commands in the New Testament is you could find it in different places. I’m going to quote it from Philippians 4 and verse 6. It is where the apostle Paul says,”Do not be anxious about anything.”
One translation actually puts that, “Don’t worry about anything.” And I don’t have to tell you that’s difficult. You know, there are some people who literally [clears throat and cough] who literally worry themselves sick. And at times that’s that’s true even physically. We when we lived out in West Texas and that’s getting two decades ago or more at this point, Cindy worked with someone whose mom if I remember correctly and I’ll just go and tell you I might not.
And this might sound like something that’s not a medical condition at all who people who know medical conditions, but if I remember it correctly, this this lady’s mom had a condition that worsened. It was a skin condition of s some kind and it worsened every time stress or anxiety would build up. And the way I remember it being I only knew her for just a brief time. So it’s not like I watched this unfold time and again but it was something that to be honest when it would happen she would stress about it and she’d become anxious and it’d get worse.
And so she’d become anxious because it was stressful. And and you can just see how that’s going to go. This is going to keep going around. It’s going to it’s going to keep building from there. That’s kind of an extreme example. Not everyone necessarily experiences physical symptoms like that. For other people, the toll is emotional. In fact, the Bible says in Proverbs 12 and verse 25 that anxiety weighs down the heart. And we know that to be true. I read some statistics recently that dealt with the fact that the use of medication to treat both anxiety and depression has just continued to just kind of rise through the years.
And I’ll go and tell you, I go on record, I’m not opposed to the proper use of that kind of medication. In fact, I’m thankful that it exists. But I do believe that may tell us something about the world in which we live today. I mean, things like that obviously have taken a toll in on many people, on their lives. And although there may be times when it’s nothing more than maybe a a medical condition, physiological condition, it seems clear to me that there are also times when it’s something even more significant than that, when it’s a spiritual condition.
And I think it’s important to to point out that what we’re talking about this morning is the spiritual problem. And so the things that that worry us, the things about which we become anxious are often things over which we have little to no control. Have you ever noticed that anxiety is often caused by trying to assume responsibility for things that we simply cannot control? And so what we need to understand is that no matter how hard we try, no matter how much effort we put into it, no matter how much thought we give it, we will never be able to control tomorrow.
[snorts] And isn’t that what we’re so often worried about? I mean, we don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring, and that tends to worry us. And it is ironic that the way that most people try to relieve their anxiety about the future actually does more harm than it does good. It’s contributing to their worries, not relieving them. And so, think for a moment, how how do most people handle their concerns about the future? I’d suggest that most people seem to think that the way to end all of their worries is to acquire and to store away as much money and as many material things as they can.
And many people in our society spend a great deal of their time worrying about how to acquire and how to store away as much money and as many things as they can because they believe that these are the thing that things that are going to free them from anxiety in the future. And in these cases, their solution is simply a part of the problem. And so, the only way that we will ever win the battle over worry is to listen to what Jesus said about it.
And so, in our study this morning, I want us to talk about the truth about worry. And I want us to look at what Jesus said here in Matthew chapter 6. Start with me in verse 25. He said, “Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not of more value than they? And which of you, by being anxious, can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the liies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. Yet uh yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is alive, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, oh you of little faith?
Therefore, do not be anxious, saying, “What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear?” For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. I want us to to point out three things from what Jesus said here.
1. Worry Is Unnecessary
There’s maybe more that we could talk about, but the first thing that I want you to notice from this passage is that Jesus said worry is unnecessary. And the reason Jesus gave for worry being unnecessary is that we have a benevolent father. And so what Jesus wanted us to see is that God is good and and that he actually delights in meeting the needs of his people. uh the one who made the universe wants to take care of you. And what Jesus did in our passage is he he gave us a quick lesson in quote unquote theology from the birds.
And I’ll just go ahead and tell you this morning, I am not much of a bird watcher. Just not my thing. But what Jesus said is that we would gain some insight into the fact that God provides for his creatures if we just take a moment to consider that. Let me let me ask you this. When was the last time you just saw a bird drop out of the sky? I I don’t mean when it was shot or something like that. That’s a different scenario entirely. But that kind of thing just doesn’t happen a lot.
They don’t just drop out of the sky because of a lack of nourishment or something like that. And as far as I know, birds don’t have anxiety attacks. God takes care of them. But what Jesus was trying to say is that if God takes care of the birds, what is he going to do for those who are made in his image? What is he going to do do for those who are fellows with his his son? In other words, will the God who takes care of the birds fail to meet the needs of his own children? Is that the God that we serve? It seems unlikely, doesn’t it? You see, worry causes us to forget what we are worth to God.
I mean, we believe that God is able to save us from our sins, right? I mean, I hope we do, but we sometimes wonder if he can take care of our other basic needs. And the evil of worry is that it causes us to act like people who don’t believe that God is capable of doing what he’s promised that he will do. And of all people, we ought to be able to live our lives with the full confidence that God is well well able to meet every need that we have if we’ll simply set our hearts on his kingdom and his glory.
And of course, Jesus wasn’t trying to say that that we don’t have anything to do with that. You know, we we’re not part of that process. We don’t have to earn a living or anything like that. Nor was he saying that we’ll never have problems. That’s not what Jesus was saying at all. His point is that God can meet our needs if we’ll set our hearts on seeking him. David once said, , he said, “I was young and now I’m old and yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children children begging for bread.”
Now, I go and tell you as someone who’s teaching David’s life right now, that doesn’t mean that David’s life was always easy. you go through and there’s there were some genuine difficulties that David faced, but God always provided. And if we set our hearts on living our lives to his glory, God will grant to us whatever we may need in order to fulfill that goal, in order for us to bring glory to him as we as we go about our our daily affairs. And so each of us is counting on a God who keeps his promises.
We’re counting on the fact that God’s not going to change his mind uh concerning what he said uh about, you know, the future for us when we get to the day of judgment, right? We are counting on his promises. And what we need to learn is to count on what God has that God’s not going to change his mind about doing what he said for this life either of providing for those who are seeking to do his will. Worry is an indication that we’re being mastered by our circumstances rather than by God’s word and by God’s track record.
2. Worry Is Unproductive
Frankly, worry is unnecessary. But not only is worry unnecessary, Jesus also said that worry is unproductive. Can you remember the last time that worry produced anything of value in your life? I just going to tell you might have a hard time coming up with an answer to that question because the truth is worry just doesn’t produce anything of value. One writer put it this way. He said, ‘W worry is a lot like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t exactly get you anywhere.
And I think that’s exactly it. It can’t make you taller. It can’t extend your life. In fact, if anything, studies show that it can affect our health. It can shorten our lives. can cause us to be un unproductive at the things that we ought to be doing. It serves to make us miserable. There’s a guy by the name of Thomas Carile. He was a he was a famous essaist and historian. And actually, I don’t know how famous he was. I have the fact that I have to explain that to you. I mean, probably says he’s not as famous as I thought, but he lived at one point in time in the Chelsea section of London.
And he had a he had a special room built in the attic of his home with padded walls. And he did this to block out the sound so that he could write in peace so he could have some silence. And the only problem was that his neighbor had a rooster and that rooster would crow three times a night and he could not no matter how hard he tried keep that sound out of his study. And so he went over to his neighbor’s house and he complained about this rooster.
And the neighbor said, “The the rooster only crows three times a night. Surely that couldn’t annoy you too much.” To which Thomas Carlile responded, “Oh, but if you only knew what I suffer waiting for it to crow.” That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s the waiting that causes us to suffer the most. And so, we worry about tomorrow. And yet, I’ll just go and tell you, the only time we ever experience anything is today. And so, we get worked up at times about what might happen. And and we get so worked up that we find it difficult to deal with what is happening.
And there’s no telling how many productive activities we have ignored through the years simply by borrowing trouble from tomorrow. And so, what we need to learn to do is to live life one day at a time rather than allowing today to be destroyed by tomorrow. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Jesus concludes this whole little section of the sermon by saying in verse 34 there, “Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”
Again, most of our worries have to do with tomorrow, don’t they? Once read about a guy who said he used to he used to be a worrier. Uh he decided somewhere along the way that he had to do something about that. Uh and so anytime he began to worry, this was his solution. He decided he was going to write it down on a piece of paper. If it was something he couldn’t do anything with at that moment, he was going to write it down on a piece of paper and he was going to put it away. And each morning when he got up, what he would do is he would look at all the little pieces of paper that he had accumulated and he would take those that he could do something about that day.
He would take those with him. He would put the those that he couldn’t do anything with back where he stored them. And then he would throw away those that were no longer a concern. He said I ended up throwing about 90% of them away because that’s how it works. Now, I don’t know if that would work for everyone who tends to worry about things. But what I do know is that each of us has to learn how to deal with the issues of the day and and allow things that are out of our control to be set aside to be dealt with maybe at some point in the future.
Maybe that is a necessity, no doubt. But if we can’t do anything about them now, let’s not worry about them now. that may have to be addressed. But I suspect that much of the time we would find that the things that we worry about really just don’t amount to much in the long run. Not in the whole scheme of things. The problem is that we tend to see every concern of ours as worthy of our immediate attention. We’ve got to think about this now. And ultimately, of course, what we have to learn to do is is to take those things that that are a concern to us to take them to the Lord.
Peter talked about in 1 Peter chapter 5 and verse 7, he he talked about casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you. And that may not come naturally to us. In fact, I don’t think it does, but it’s something we need to to learn to do all the same. One of the reasons I I use this particular passage is because I I don’t know for sure, but I wonder if Peter had to learn to do that himself. I’m sure he did. I mean, really, we all do. And I don’t know if Peter was prone to to worrying about things or not.
But I will tell you this. I don’t think Peter was the kind of person who very naturally just cast all his anxieties on anybody. I think he was the person who I’m going to take care of this myself. And in part, I’m sure Peter learned that lesson the hard way. But he learned it. Learned it enough to teach it. And let me just point out that that casting all of our concerns on the Lord that needs to become the become the conditioned reflex of every child of God.
You know, some reflexes are instinctive. Nobody has to tell you that when you touch a hot stove, you need to pull away from that. You figure that out on your own pretty quick, but other reflexes, they’re conditioned. They don’t come naturally to us, but eventually they become second nature to us. For example, those of you who drove here this morning, what did you do when you approached a stop sign or a red light? You’re like, “I know the answer to this, man. I What is it that I’m supposed to do [clears throat] here?”
We get it. You You put your foot on the brake, right? Did you think about that? Did you you put your brain in gear and say, “Man, I really I need to figure this out.” No, you didn’t do that. Why? Because it just comes naturally to us. You just do it. And the thing is, that’s where we need to get in the matter of dealing with worry. It needs to become part of who we are. When we begin to feel anxious about something, it simply needs to become second nature for us to turn that concern over to the Lord because our worry can’t fix anything.
3. Worry Is Unreasonable
So, we need to turn it over to someone who can. As one person said, he’s going to be up all night anyway. Let the Lord handle that. And so, worry is unnecessary. It is unproductive. But Jesus basically said it’s also unreasonable. Shouldn’t do it because it’s not reasonable. You know, many of us would have to admit that we’re prone to giving considerable amounts of time and attention to the kinds of things Jesus addressed in our text. What are we going to eat? What are we going to wear? We can become preoccupied almost exclusively with things that are material in nature if we’re not careful about that.
And what we need to recognize is that being preoccupied exclusively with material things is only reasonable if physical survival is the beall and end all of existence. And here’s the thing, it’s not. Jesus said that human beings are more than just bodies that need to be fed and clothed. And all you have to do to see that we have a problem with that kind of thing in our society is look at the way things are advertised. The body is the the key to life.
It’s the key to everything. And we sometimes buy into that kind of thinking. We get worried when our lives aren’t what we have been told that they ought to be. And when we do that, it shouldn’t surprise us that we end up seeking the same things that the world seeks and worrying about the same things that the world worries about. And all too often, that’s exactly what we end up doing. Our anxiety about such things betrays the fact that we have bought into a false view of what we are as human beings to some degree.
And so what Jesus said is that we’ve been called to something much higher than that. We were put on this earth to do more than adorn and refuel the body as important as those things are. And so just to to sum up what I think Jesus was saying, we were put here first and foremost to seek God and to promote his reign in the world. That’s why we’re here. The real key to life is found in Matthew 6 and verse 33 where Jesus says, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”
Conclusion
Why? Because that is priority number one. So I want to ask you this morning, is that your ambition in life? Is your ambition to seek the Lord or is it to pamper the body? I want you to remember this one thing as we bring the lesson to a close this morning. Any area of our lives where God is not put first will ultimately become a source of worry for us. I’m going to say that again because I think it’s worth doing. So any area of our lives where God has not put first will ultim ultimately become a source of worry for us.
It’s vital for us to understand this principle. What Jesus encourages us to do is to take our eyes off ourselves and look for ways to advance the kingdom of God. That’s the secret to worry-free living. Don’t let your life be dominated by worry. Trust God. Seek his his kingdom and his righteousness. Cast all your anxieties on him. He cares for you. Is there anxiety in your life? Is it because there’s some sin that needs to be taken care of? I’ll tell you what, that happens sometimes, doesn’t it?
And the thing about it is the Lord wants us to cast that anxiety on him as well, doesn’t he? If you’re here this morning, you never become a Christian. Why not obey the gospel? Why not when you end the day today, be able to put your head on your pillow with all of your sins forgiven, with all of that baggage taken out of the way? There’s nothing like that. or if you’ve done that at some point in life, but you’ve let sin creep back in and it just has a way of doing that sometimes if we’re not if we’re not careful about that.
That’ll be a source of anxiety for us as well. And so, if there’s something that does need to be take taken care of, by all means, take care of it. There is that, no doubt. But if you’re here this morning and you owe some duty to him, you need to make something right with him, we can help you with that. That’s what we want to do. And if we can do that, we encourage you to come as we stand and as we sing. I