Worrying

Good morning. By a show of hands, how many worriers do we have out there? If we are honest with ourselves, we all worry a bit, but there are some people that seem to be able to worry enough for everyone. People like me who actually have the gift of going down paths of worry thinking about things that some people don’t even think about let alone worry. Things that occupy space and time in my brain. Things that probably will not even come to fruition. Psychologists have a name for these types of people. They are called the melancholies of the world. They are people who see life as half-empty. If you are familiar with the Winnie the Pooh characters, they would be considered the Eeyores of the world. The people that walk around with a rain cloud over their head. It is my birthday party and no one is going to come to it. They are pity-party people. In defense of the melancholies, I would suggest that we are just simply realists. We view the world the way it really is. The reality is the world is a place that has a lot of trouble and gives a lot of cause for worry. As much as I would like to use the problems of the world as a defense for worry, the reality is the real problem is that sometimes we are people of little faith. People who fail to see the real reality. The reality of the kingdom of God that is currently amongst us. Today, we are going to continue in the series called Learning to Live Like Jesus. It says it is an 11-week series. I think we are on week 13 so far and probably have about 5 or 6 more weeks to go. It is a series based on the words of Jesus found in Matthew 5, 6, and 7 called the Sermon on the Mount. Last week we looked at the passage that talked about the tendency to store up treasure on earth.

Today, we are going to go into the topic of worry as you might have imagined. I would like to have somebody read out of the book of Matthew 6:25-34. (Scripture read here.) As you can see, this passage is an extended passage about the topic of worry. You might also notice that the passage starts out with the word “Therefore”. Jesus says “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life.” One of the basic rules of Bible study is that when you come across the word therefore, you are supposed to ask what is it there for. It wants you to reference what came before it. In this case, what Jesus is saying is in light of what I just told you, you really shouldn’t have to worry about anything at all in your life. That should catch the readers and the listeners’ attention and make you curious and want to look at what came in prior.

We have to briefly look at the passage last week. You may recall the passage was about storing up treasures on earth versus heaven. Jesus said “Do not store up treasures on earth, where rust and moths destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where moths and rust do not destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal.” The most important verse is the one that comes right before this one here that forces the listener to make a choice as far as who they are going to follow. Are they going to follow God or are they going to follow money? The passage reads “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” The assumption is that the listeners of the day and even the readers today would choose rightly to worship God over money.

Then he continues on with the opening of today’s verse where he 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.” It is sometimes difficult to connect these two verses together that we just mentioned, so it is helpful at this time to look at a paraphrase that comes from the book The Message because I think he has a way of writing that really makes it clear exactly what Jesus is trying to say here. He says “If you decide for God, living a life of God worship (in other words if you choose God over money) it follows that you don’t fuss about what is on the table at meal times or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion.” It makes a little bit more sense. To paraphrase it even more, if you make God number one in your life, then you really have nothing to worry about because God is a provider and he has adequate provision in his kingdom to satisfy all your needs. That is the summary of what Jesus is trying to say here. But knowing that there are some melancholies in the crowd and worriers in the crowd, Jesus feels like he needs to give some illustrations to support his logic. As Jesus often does, he draws his illustrations from nature that surrounds him. Jesus has a great way of doing this. He is sitting there on the side of the hill and talking to the people and the birds start landing around him and feeding around him on worms or seeds. Then he says “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.” We don’t know why he picked birds. If he was here today he might have picked rabbits or squirrels or possibly even a cat. He could have said look at the cat. He is looking at the cat while Francesca is looking at the birds outside before she pursues them. All kidding aside, he says “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.” He is not saying the birds are lazy. We know that birds are very hard workers. But when they work, they don’t get stressed out. They don’t worry about whether they are going to get enough or whether there is going to be something there for tomorrow because they know that their creator provides for them every single day over and over. The point being that if God provides for the birds, he is certainly going to provide for his children as implied by the rhetorical question that Jesus gives when he says “Are you not much more valuable than they?” It is a rhetorical question because the answer is implied. The answer is yes. If they say no, then at a minimum it demonstrates ignorance and at a maximum that they have low self-worth. I think it is in Matthew 10 where Jesus says “Aren’t two sparrows sold for the equivalent of a penny?” Of course the answer is that the people are more valuable than the birds. Not simply more valuable, much more valuable than the birds.