[This is the next part in a series based on Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer "The Serenity Prayer." Past sermons dealt "the serenity to accept the things I cannot change," "courage to change the things that I can," and "the wisdom to know the difference." This sermon is on the next segment: "Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time.]
The Disciples look at each other. “Why has the rabbi called us together?” they wonder. They fall silent as Jesus begins to speak. “It is time for you to go out on your own for a while. Take nothing for your journey … no staff … nor bag … nor bread … nor money … not even an extra tunic. Whatever house you enter, stay there, and leave from there. Wherever they do not welcome you, as you are leaving that town shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them” (Luke 9:3-5). He then gave them power over diseases and authority over demons (Luke 9:1) and they departed and went through the villages, bringing the good news and curing diseases everywhere (Luke 9:6).
Take nothing for your journey … no staff … no bag … no bread … no money … not even an extra tunic. Rely on God to guide you. Rely totally on God to provide for you. It must have been very important for His disciples to learn this because Jesus sends out another group later on with the same instructions: “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals … Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who share in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid” (Luke 10:4-7). When they returned, says Luke, “they were filled with joy, saying, ‘Lord, in Your name even the demons submit to us!’” (Luke 10:17).
Take nothing for your journey … no staff … no bag … no bread … no money … not even an extra tunic. It must have been pretty scary to be sent out with nothing … no staff … no bag … no bread … no money … no sandals … not even an extra tunic … relying totally on God to provide for them and yet, after heading out and relying on God, they returned filled with joy … an experience that the so-called ‘Rich Young Ruler’ would never get to experience. When Jesus challenged him to sell all his possessions and distribute the money to the poor and put his complete trust in God to provide for him and take care of him, he couldn’t do it and walked away grieving (Mark 10:17-22).
One day a man approached Jesus asking to if he could be one of His disciples. “I will follow you wherever you go,” he pledged. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head,” said Jesus … in other words, are you willing to drop your nets … to leave everything … as I have been … as all of my disciples have been … and rely on God to provide for you and to take care of you?
Here’s something you may not have ever noticed before. When Jesus sent the disciples out with no staff … no bag … no bread … no money … no scandals … not even an extra tunic, Jesus wasn’t asking them to do something extraordinary … nor was He asking them to do something that He wasn’t willing to do Himself. From the moment that He began His ministry until they nailed Him to the cross, Jesus had no place to lay His head. It sounds so hard … it sounds, well, reckless not to worry about where you’re going to sleep, what you’re going to eat, the dangers that lie ahead … but what Jesus is trying to teach His disciples is that worry is actually a pointless exercise and, quite honestly, a waste of precious time, as we shall see.
[Read Matthew 6:25-34]
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear” (Matthew 6:25). How?! How do I not worry about life? How do I not worry about what I will eat or drink? How can I not worry about this body? Right? Well, says Reinhold Niebuhr, we do it by “living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time.”
Worry is not only pointless, my friends, it is also a liar and a thief. Mark Twain once commented on how pointless worry really is: “I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened” (goodreads.com/quotes). Will Rogers put it another way: “I know worrying works because none of the stuff I worried about ever happened” (AZquotes.com). He also said that worrying “is like paying a debt that may never come due” (AZquotes.com). It’s like paying a debt that never comes due. How true.
Now, I’m going to show you the clever little trick that ‘worry’ plays on us. What, exactly, is “worry”? Well, “worry” is looking into the future and anticipating certain outcomes ... what I call the “what if’s.” What if this happens? What if that happens? I think about all the things that I think might or could happen … and what started as a tiny pebble rolling downhill becomes an avalanche. One worry begats another worry … which begats another worry … and pretty soon I’m buried under all kinds of possible problems and trying to solve them all in my mind … as if staving off one problem will keep it from begetting all the other problems that I think that that one problem will produce … but no matter how hard I try to solve all the possible problems in my head, more of them just keep popping up. Can I get a witness or am I alone in this?
Here's the ‘pointless’ part. As Mark Twain and Will Rogers point out, 99% of them never happen. Let that sink in for a moment. My head is filled with all these possible problems … I try to solve them … but none … or almost none … of them ever happens … which means I’ve spent time … precious time … trying to figure out and solve a lot of problems that never happen. That’s pretty pointless, amen?
It's actually way more pointless than you think because, you see, everything that I’m worried about … all the problems that I’m trying to unravel and solve … I made up. Let that sink in. None of us here has a crystal ball that can foretell the future. None of us here knows what going to happen in the future … be it tomorrow or an hour from now, am I right? So … if the future is a complete unknown … if the future is a ‘tabula rasa’ … a blank slate … then why do we project only bad things or mostly bad things on to it? You ever notice that? Worry, by its very nature, is based on negative thinking, negative presumptions, right? I don’t worry if I’m going to run out of gas when the fuel gauge on my car says ‘full.’ I don’t worry about whether the sun is going to come up tomorrow. I don’t worry if there’s going to be air to breath 10 minutes from now. Well … now that I mention it … maybe I should worry about that … that the sun might not come up tomorrow or there won’t be any air 10 minutes from now. See how worry always pushes us towards the negative, towards disaster … which never happens. And here’s the thing … when the sun does come up tomorrow, I’m relieved but how long does that relief last until I’m worrying about something else? “Whew! The sun came up but what about ….”
Here’s the subtle, dark side of worry. If I am ‘worried’ it’s because I’m looking into the dark, unknowable future and making assumptions about what could or might happen and then trying to solve them or ‘prepare’ for them. Remember what the word ‘decision’ means? The prefix ‘de’ means to ‘remove’ or ‘from’ and the word ‘cision’ means ‘to cut into’ … so the word ‘decision’ literally means ‘to cut away’ or to ‘cut away from’ … to cut away your options until you arrive at what you think is your best possible course of action. The word ‘prepare’ has a similar meaning. The prefix ‘pre’ means ‘before’ and the word ‘pare’ means to ‘cut away.’ ‘Preparation’ involves looking down the road and anticipating possible problems, examining our options should said problems arise … keeping in mind that they haven’t arisen yet … we’re just anticipating them … and then selecting what we believe to be the best course of action or the best options from all the possible options that we think we have available to us … except, we come back to our original problem in that we are anticipating and attempting to solve problems that may or may not happen.
So … let’s say that I’m looking into the future and I see, oh, three possible problems coming my way. Let’s label them problems A, B, and C. I worry. I plan. I prepare. Only … guess what? A doesn’t happen ... B doesn’t happen ... C doesn’t happen ... but … D happens. D! I had no idea that ‘D’ was coming down the pike. I didn’t see ‘D’ coming … wasn’t on my radar … so, guess what? I didn’t worry about D. I worried about A. I worried about B. I worried about C. But I didn’t worry about D. And all I could do about D was deal with it … handle it when it happens, amen? So, I worried about the things I thought were going to happen and I didn’t worry about the thing that actually did happen. Hum … are we beginning to see what Jesus is talking about? “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Matthew 6:34). How about we deal with the problems that we actually have instead of worrying about all the problems we don’t have, amen?
I said that worry is pointless and it is a liar. Worry, by its very nature, is a lie because it is based on assumptions and projections about the future … a future, my friend, that hasn’t happened yet. I don’t worry if my car is going to break down when it is actually broken down. You don’t worry, “Gee, what am I going to do if my car breaks down” because it is, in fact, broken … but I immediately begin worrying about how I am going to fix it and how am I going to pay for the repair bill … even before I know what the repair is or how much it’s going to cost. Worry is all about what if … what might happen. It’s all about what hasn’t happened yet and most probably will not happen.
If you’re like me, I always assume the worst possible scenario. If my car doesn’t start, I assume it could be the battery … which might cost me $100 or so. Or it could be the car’s electronic brain … which could cost me well over a thousand dollars … if I can even get the part at all given the supply chain problems we’ve been having. See what I mean? All the ‘what ifs’? Until I get my car to the repair shop, nothing that I’m worried about is real … it’s all just possibility … and, as Jesus points out, none of my worrying will change the outcome. If it’s the battery, none of my worrying will change that. If it’s the car’s computer or some chip, no amount of worrying will change that either. All I can do is wait until I get to the repair shop, find out what’s ACTUALLY going on, and then pay the shop for fixing my car.
You know what? I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve lost count of the number of times that my car has broken down and every time … every single time … guess what? Somehow it got fixed and somehow it got paid for, amen? It’s not fun. It’s not something that I enjoy but it’s something that happens if you own a car, amen? If you own a car, guess what? It’s gonna break down … I promise. No matter how healthy you think you are … you’re gonna get sick … and no amount of worry, as Jesus points out, is going to change that … so why waste your time worrying about what’s going to happen and just enjoy the fact that your car IS working today and that you are more or less healthy today and … here’s the crux of what Jesus is talking about … trust that when your car breaks down that God will get you through it just He has the last six hundred and seventy-five other times that your car broke down … and if your car can’t be fixed, He’ll get you another car … just like He’s gotten you the other 10 or 12 cars that you’ve owned, amen?
Worry is a liar and worry is a thief. Worrying about the future steals the present. As Corrie ten Boom observed: “Worry doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength” (AZquotes.com). If I am worried about what’s going to happen, I can’t see what God is actually doing all around me right here, right now. If I am in my car worrying about all the crazy possible things that could happen then I’m not looking at the fantastic world that is unfolding all around me … the Carolina blue sky, the clouds, the mountains, the trees and flowers, the hawk flying up above. I’m so worried about what might be that I don’t see and experience what’s going on right now. I don’t see that God is taking care of the birds. I don’t see the beautiful way that God has clothed the flowers. And when tomorrow get here, I usually don’t notice that all the problems I worried about either didn’t happen or worked themselves out because I’m already worrying about tomorrow and tomorrow and today after today just keeps slipping by almost unnoticed. Again, can I get a witness or am I the only one that this happens to? Before I know it, days and weeks and even years have passed and I have wasted them trying to solve an endless stream of problems that never happened and there is nothing that I can do to get back that time.
As I said, worry is a thief. It not only steals our time and our joy, it can actually steal our health. Dr. W.C. Alvarez, a stomach specialist at the Mayo Clinic reports that “80 percent of the stomach disorders that come to us are not organic…. Most of our ills are caused by worry and fear” (Ferguson, B., God, I’ve Got a Problem. Peabody, MA: Gospel Light Publishing; 1987; p. 71). In fact, Dr. Charles Mayo, one of the founders of the Mayo Clinic, observed: “Worry affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system. I have never known a man who died from overwork, but many who died from doubt” (Ibid., p. 77) … “many who died from doubt” … another way of looking at ‘worry’ … doubt about the future … doubt that God has got your back … doubt that God will get you through it.
Another word to describe ‘worry’ is ‘supposing.’ There was a faithful but poor Christian woman who was always cheerful, always smiling, always excited about life. A friend of hers decided that she was too cheerful and thought that she needed a dose of ‘reality.’ “I know you’re always smiling and happy,” her friend said, “but your Pollyanna approach to life isn’t realistic. I don’t think you understand how hard life can get. I mean, just suppose that you got sick … or suppose that your employer moved away and you lost your job …” The good woman cut her off. “It’s all that ‘supposing’ that make YOU so miserable, my dear. Why don’t you give up all that ‘supposing’ and just put your trust in the Lord. The Lord is my shepherd, and I don’t ‘suppose,’ I KNOW that I shall not want.” O yeah!
“Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” Jesus asks. It’s a rhetorical question and we all know the answer, don’t we? The answer is “No!” All our worry has not added a single hour or minute to the span of our lives … in fact, it usually takes away the hours and minutes that we could be enjoying now and can shorten the span of our lives by hours and days, even months and years.
Worry doesn’t fix anything … it only makes things appear to be worse. Worry is worthless. Worry is a liar. Worry is a thief. So why do we keep doing it? I alluded to it earlier. It boils down to trust … to faith. Do I trust, like the chronically cheerful woman in my illustration, that God is my Shepherd? That God will take care of me in the future just like He has taken care of me in the past? ‘Worry’ happens when I put more faith in my problems than I do in God’s promises. Let me repeat that. ‘Worry’ is what happens when I put more faith in my problems than I do in God’s promises … or when I put more faith in my abilities than I do in God’s … which SHOULD cause me to worry because my ability, my knowledge, my skills, my power is extremely limited and usually not up to the task … which is why I should worry, amen? Because, if it’s left up to me, I’m pretty much doomed to fail, amen?
Now, maybe it’s just me … probably is … but when I would read today’s scripture passage, I always heard a note or tone of resignation. “Look, you can’t do anything about yesterday. You can’t do anything about tomorrow. You’re stuck in today so just deal with the problems that you have today. Okay?” What Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer did, however, was open me up to the freedom … the FREEDOM … in what Jesus was trying to express when He said “do not worry about tomorrow … do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink” (Matthew 6:34, 25).
Think about it. I look at the birds and realize that God is providing for me just as He is providing for them. I look at the flowers and beauty of God’s creation all around me and realize what David meant when he said that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). I really can’t do anything to change yesterday. All I can do is hopefully learn from it. Tomorrow isn’t here yet but if I look at the birds, if I look at the flowers, if I look at the work of God that is going on all around me, then I know that God … who took care of the birds and the flowers yesterday … the God who is taking care of the birds, the flowers today, will take care of me today and tomorrow … and the next day … and the next day … and the days and weeks and months after that. And I can, in fact, “see” the work of God going on all around me because I’m not wallowing in the past or ruminating about the future. I’m here. I’m present. God is here … now … in the present … and I can enjoy each moment.
We all worry. It creeps around the edges of our thoughts constantly … but I can keep it at bay by staying in the present and reminding myself of the first three lines of Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer and ask: Right now, is there anything that I can do about it? If there is, God grant me the courage to change it. If I can’t, God grant me the serenity to accept that for now … not forever … but for now … today … I can accept what’s happening and experience serenity and freedom in knowing that God is in control … God has my back … God is way ahead of me … already working on problems that I don’t even know that I have. I can, in the words of the cheerful woman, stop ‘supposing’ and live in today confidence that the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. So long as do my little part … so long as I do the next right thing … so long as I keep putting one foot in front of the other and continue to walk in faith, the future will unfold as it is meant to unfold and God, who is my rod and staff, will continue to guide me.
“Strive first for the kingdom of God and His righteousness,” says Jesus, “and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33). If I keep my eyes on Jesus and not on my problems … if I keep doing the next right thing … then I will be spared all the worry that seems to dominate so much of the world today. The Apostle Peter commanded us to “cast all [our] anxiety on [the Lord] for He cares for you” (1st Peter 5:7) … but I won’t cast my cares on Him if a don’t believe that He is interested in my problems or will take care of them, amen? I cast my cares on Him because I know that He will, indeed, take care of them … IS taking care of them. God is the antidote for my worry and my anxiety.
Echoing Jesus’ words, the Apostle Paul commands us to “not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7). Look at the birds of the field and rejoice in the Lord. Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow and rejoice in the Lord. Look at what God is doing in your life right now and rejoice! Rejoice in the things that God has already done and you will be content with whatever you have. You will be able to face whatever the moment or the day may bring your way because you know that you can do all things through Him who strengthens you (Philippines 4:13). If I rejoice in what is true, what is honorable, what is just, what is pure, what is pleasing, what is commendable, what is excellent, what is worthy of praise and not on all the gloom and doom that my mind can manufacture about the future, then I can truly live and enjoy life one day at a time, one moment at a time, amen? Doesn’t that sound wonderful?
Let us pray:
God … grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change. Grant us the courage to change the things that we can and grant us the wisdom to know the difference so that we can live and enjoy each and every moment and each and every day. We humbly and gratefully pray in Jesus’ name who taught us this magnificent and freeing truth. And would all who would like to give up all their unnecessary worry make it so by saying … Amen!
