Wednesday
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? - Matthew 6:25-27
One of the things that Jesus does in His wonderful teaching on worry and anxiety is to show us what worry really is. If we are going to live our lives free from the paralyzing effects of worry, then we should probably begin by understanding what exactly it is. Most people have the view that worry is the result of stressful circumstances or events. For example: A co-worker who has just been “let-go” from the company you both work for. You have your annual performance review coming up and you are worried and anxious about how it will go. You get the very sad news that your best friend has an inoperable brain tumor and the doctors are not optimistic about his chances for survival. In either case, it is common for people to assume that the circumstance is causing the worry. But actually, Jesus is telling us that deep down worry is really not caused by circumstances or events in our lives.
Deep down, worry and anxiety are rooted in our desire to control that, which is beyond our control.
Notice what Jesus says in verse 27, “who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?” Of course we cannot add hours or days or even minutes to our lives, but his is precisely Jesus’ point, we want too, we want to be able to add. We want to be able to control and to manage our own lives. We don’t like the feeling of being “out of control”.
I recall several years ago driving home from church on a winter evening. The roads had been cleared by the snowplows, but they were still slick in places. The car in front of me made a sudden left turn and when I hit the brakes I knew immediately that I had lost control of my car. I had hit a patch of black ice (ice you cannot see) and the rear of my car swung around so that I was sliding sideways down the middle of the road at about 40 mph into oncoming traffic. Fortunately, I missed the other cars (or they missed me) and only ended up sliding into a snow-bank on the other side. It was only a few seconds, but the feeling of being totally out of control, helpless and powerless to do anything about the situation gave me a sick feeling in my gut.
Many people feel this way in their lives, they feel like they are totally helpless and sliding out of control and it is a sick feeling. The truth is that the event or circumstance, which we think is causing this feeling of anxiety in us, is actually just revealing our true condition. We have always been vulnerable, we have never really been in control, we are always totally dependant on the mercy of God. Jesus is telling us here that one of the first steps in freeing our hearts from the tyranny of worry is to acknowledge that we are not in control to begin with.
Martin Luther’s friend Philip Melancthon was full of fear and anxiety over how the early stages of the Reformation were going and he worried constantly about how others were going to respond. Luther once wrote in response to his friend’s anxiety, “let Philip cease to rule the world.”
If you cannot bring your self to admit that you are really not in control of your own life, then you will never get free from worry or anxiety. Jesus is telling you that your worry is really about your desire to control that which you should be trusting to God – the One who is really in control.
Jeff Frazier
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