Matthew 6:25-34
Good morning, everyone. It is a privilege to be able to open the Word of God with you this morning. I’ll be preaching today and next week out of Matthew chapter 6. And starting in October, after much deserved rest, Travis will be back in the pulpit. They’re back from Minnesota. They’re here with us today. It’s a joy to have them back, but he’ll be back in the pulpit in October.
So if you would, turn in your copy of God’s Word to the book of Matthew chapter 6. Our subject before us today is that of anxiety and worry. The anxious heart has been a steady feature of every generation since the fall; the expulsion from the garden of Adam and Eve, and from then on.
While it is most certainly a problem that is obvious in our world today, more so today than ever before, because for the first generation in a long time, they’ve abandoned, at least in Western society, totally abandoned the foundation of the Judeo-Christian worldview that our society has stood on for many, many centuries.
But it’s been a problem for God’s people throughout history. You can go all the way back to Genesis and find examples of how worry and anxiety made saints do stupid things. Just take Abraham, the father of the faith, for example. In Genesis 12, we see that a famine forces Abram and Sarai to sojourn in Egypt, and while they’re still on the way, Abram begins to think about and forebode about the future, imagining that the Egyptians will kill him because of his beautiful wife.
So he tells her, and they lie and say that she is his sister. Pharaoh takes Sarai into his house, and Yahweh strikes Pharaoh’s house with plagues in order to reveal this. Yahweh, or rather, Pharaoh finds out, and he tells Abram, what is this you have done to me?
Then, in Genesis chapter 20, to Abraham’s credit, it was like 20 plus years later, he does the same thing again. Genesis chapter 20, after God has cut a covenant with him and changed his name to Abraham and his wife’s name to Sarah, he does the same thing, and another king, Abimelech, takes her into his home. Makes the same foolish mistake, and he has a similar response.
The Lord comes to him in a dream and says, you’ve taken another man’s wife, and I’m going to kill you unless you return him. So he confronts Abraham with very similar words. What is this you have done? Why did you lie about this? Anxiety is a major problem in every society, but we know that it’s also a problem in the hearts of God’s people as well.
And Jesus, in his great kindness and compassion for his creatures, he spends in this message on the Sermon on the Mount, he uses over ten percent of the Sermon on the Mount to deal with this one issue that plagues the hearts of men. And indeed, what he’s already taught us in the Sermon on the Mount will do much to dispel worry and anxiety from our hearts.
Just before this was the Lord’s prayer in teaching us a pattern to pray. That alone will dispel worry from our hearts. Yet he wants to address this topic directly, because he knows how much his people need it. But let’s read the text together. Matthew 6:25 to 34, and we’re going to take two weeks to cover this section.
But beginning in verse 25, “Jesus says, ‘For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life as to what you will eat or what you will drink, nor for your body as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?
“‘And which of you, by worrying, could add a single cubit to his lifespan? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow. They do not toil, nor do they spin. Yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.
“‘But if God so clothes the grass of the field which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will he not much more clothe you, you of little faith? Do not worry then, saying, what will we eat or what will we drink or what will we wear for clothing?
“‘For all these things the Gentiles eagerly seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need these things. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.’”
In this passage, we’re going to examine seven realities of the Christian life to ruminate on in order to dispel worry and anxiety from our hearts. Seven realities that when we meditate upon them and renew our minds with them, we’re going to begin to think more like Christ. We’re going to begin to have the mind of Christ and put off worry and put on trusting in the Lord.
Let me give you those seven things up front. We’re only going to cover the first three today. But the seven realities that we have to think upon and renew our minds with, first is your commander. Your commander. We’re going to look at the previous verse and who is our master and the command that he issues us here in verse 25.
So your commander and the command that he gives. Number two, your composition. How you are made up as a person. Number three, your class. Number four, and I’ll repeat these more next week, your capability. Number five, your constitution. Number six, your clan. And number seven, your capacity.
So we’re going to begin here, jump right into this first point of your commander, which will provide us opportunity to connect it to the previous section and the context. So if we look at verse 25, “Jesus says, ‘For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life.’ Those little words, for this reason, point us back.
Originally, I was just going to make this point about the command that Jesus gives, but he’s pointing us back to the previous verse as well. We want to just draw that in. So look at verse 24 with me. You’ll notice the heading above verse 19, if you have an LSB, is Treasures in Heaven.
He is exhorting them to seek treasures in heaven, to store up treasures in heaven. And at the end of that section, he says this in verse 24, “‘No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he’ll be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.’” You cannot serve Satan and God. I think that’s a little more obvious to us.
You cannot serve God and wealth. You cannot serve your own interests and God’s. And if you try to do so, you will vacillate back and forth between hating the one and hating the other. You can only serve one master, one commander in chief, or you can be double-minded and unstable in all your ways. But you cannot serve two masters. In light of this reality, Jesus brings up this subject of worry.
Our Lord, our creator, our master, our commander knows that one of the greatest hindrances to serving him faithfully as master and Lord is anxiety and worry. That is to say that you cannot be a worrying Christian or an anxious Christian and be faithful. You can’t be a faithful Christian and be anxious. Anxiety and worry cripple us from serving our master faithfully.
We can’t serve Jesus Christ as master and commander and serve all of our fears by worrying about them. And one of these masters, just like serving wealth, serving our fears and worry and anxiety, and serving the Lord, one of these masters is a tyrannical slave driver that gives no rest, while the other is good and kind and loving and gives rest.
Jesus said, a little bit later on in the book of Matthew, in chapter 11, verse 28 to 30, Jesus said, “‘Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’”
We can only serve one master, and there’s only one good option for who we should serve. If we serve Christ, he removes burdens and gives rest. But if we serve ourself or fears or wealth or anything else, it only puts a greater and greater burden upon our heart. Jesus Christ wants to remove burdens. He wants us to take his yoke upon us. And that’s why he gives us this command to help free us from the bondage of worry and anxiety.
There’s great freedom in this command. So we go from this reason, which is you can only serve one master, to Jesus and the command, do not be worried about your life. This command puts this, that is, worry and anxiety, in the realm of sin and righteousness. We must obey Jesus and put off worry and put on trust. And that means that there is a great freedom for us as a Christian. There is great comfort and freedom in this command.
Why? Because this means it is a choice and not some sickness that we suffer from, of which we are the victim. And this is contrary to the thinking of modern psychology in our modern world. Our world categorizes anxiety as a disorder for which you need treatment and it’s not something from which you can ever be cured.
You just have this disorder that you have to learn to live with. It can be managed with psychotherapy, talk therapy, or medication, but you’ll be managing it the rest of your life, much like people who are diagnosed with diabetes.
The way that our world thinks about this is a really a terrible existence to live under. It’s enslavement to anxiety and that’s why this command from Jesus is actually so freeing. You don’t have to be enslaved to your worry and anxiety. And I know people who have come out of that world. They’ve gotten saved; they’ve lived a life of trying to take medication and going to therapy; and they learn these blessed truths, that this is a choice. Through the power of the gospel, that they can have victory over their anxieties and their fears.
Man, this is a great encouragement and a hope. And so even in this command, it puts it in the realm of sin and righteousness, just like Jesus is going to cover after this, judging others, or just like the things he covered before this, fasting and praying, looking lustfully, anger with your neighbor. Just like those things, it’s a matter of sin and righteousness.
You don’t have to be enslaved to anxiety. You can cast all of your cares upon the Lord. And you can take upon yourself his light burden that is easy to carry, that gives you rest from enslavement of all the worries of this world.
So the very fact that this is an imperative, a command, it is a sigh of relief for a world enslaved to anxiety. And for any of us who trust in the Lord, it’s a choice that we make. We can choose to obey this and cast all of our cares upon him or not. But we are not enslaved to our anxieties. It is not something that we suffer from. It is something that we do.
Let’s look at the meaning of the command. The Greek word here, that’s translated as be worried, is the Greek word merimnao, which at its basic meaning refers to being concerned about something, giving thought to something, caring for something, attending to something. It doesn’t, in the Greek, have negative connotations to us.
It could be positive or negative based on the context. Paul commands the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 12:25 to stop being divisive and actually care for one another, to give thought to one another, not just thought to themselves. But when it’s in a context like it is today, it refers to a concern that has gone beyond a reasonable concern into anxiety, apprehensiveness, and undue concern. So the Greek word is neutral and the context determines if it’s an appropriate concern or an undue concern.
Martin Lloyd-Jones distinguishes between a healthy concern and an undue concern. He says, “I must never allow thought with regard to the future inhibit in any way my usefulness in the present. If I allow my concern about the future to cripple me in the present, I am guilty of worry.” He goes on in his commentary to talk about, you know, if we give no thought or concern whatsoever to what we are going to eat tomorrow, then at the time of Jesus, people, they wouldn’t plow, they wouldn’t sow, they wouldn’t harvest, because they’re giving no thought about tomorrow.
For us, giving no thought about those things means you wouldn’t even make a meal plan at your house. You just hope in the morning that there’s food in the fridge. That certainly isn’t what Jesus means here. He’s not talking about a good concern or even just a neutral concern or thought. He means it in the negative terms. We know from Proverbs 31 that people are praised for planning ahead, making provisions for their family. That Proverbs 31 woman who makes provision for her family works hard, makes sure they have clothes.
That’s not the kind of thought we’re talking about here. Rather, to worry is to be obsessed by the problems of life and living, Martin Lloyd-Jones says “and by fear of the future.” We might broaden even that out to say our mind, when our mind and our heart’s concern is stuck on one thing and we can’t think about anything else. The more we think about it, the more it multiplies into other problems and before you know it, you’re lost in your thought about this thing and you can’t find your way out.
MacArthur, in his commentary, has a helpful illustration of this. I’ve changed it just for my own purposes, but if you took just one tablespoon of water and you spread that tablespoon of water out into a bunch of tiny little droplets, just one tablespoon of water could cover an entire city block 50 feet deep in a dense fog.
The anxious heart has been a steady feature of every generation since the Fall.” Bret Hastings
When you have one small problem and you’re worrying about it, you’re ruminating over it, wringing your hands over it, fretting about it, you take that one small thing and you magnify it into this dense cloud of fog in your mind that you can’t see through. You can’t see anything else. It’s all you can think about. It’s all your concern. It’s all consuming.
You lay your head down at night and you can’t sleep because of it. You try to distract yourself, but as soon as you’re done with this thing over here that you’re using to distract yourself from it, that cloud settles back in. Those anxious feelings return. If it gets bad enough, a serious enough worry and anxiety leads to a panic attack, your mind racing, your heart rate increasing, getting out of rhythm even.
Here we have this gracious command from our Lord. Don’t worry about those things. Take my yoke upon you. It takes this massive problem that we’ve spread out and our mind sucks it all back into this little teaspoon. It’s just this little small problem. Don’t worry. Look how small this problem really is in the grand scheme of things. You made this problem out to be this massive thing when really it’s just this big.
Is what you eat tomorrow or drink tomorrow or wear tomorrow, is that important? Yes. Don’t neglect it. Make appropriate provisions, but don’t be preoccupied and make it into this massive problem that could never be solved. And all of a sudden in your mind’s eye, you’re starving to death tomorrow or whatever it is that you maybe have a tendency to worry about.
Maybe it’s relational issues, political issues, education, work, children, aging parents, etc. Don’t fret about these things, beloved. Don’t sit wringing your hands and ruminating about all the possible ways that these things can go wrong. Rather, make reasonable provisions for those, yes, but trust the Lord with tomorrow.
Remembering your master, your commander, and the command that he has issued here. Cast all your cares upon him. If you’ve made this little problem into this giant problem in your mind, let him turn that back into what it is. Don’t worry. Trust your sovereign God. We’re going to talk about his power next week in one of those points.
But this little problem you’ve made into this massive thing, cast your cares upon your master. He loves you. He wants to take this and put it back into perspective for you. But don’t worry. So this first reality that we want to meditate on is our commander, his easy yoke, and this specific freeing command. You’re not enslaved to this thing. All of these wandering thoughts and fearful thoughts, those are not happening to you that you are a victim of.
You can control them. Pray to the Lord. Cry out to him, and he’ll help you bring all those things back into alignment. Meditate on who your master is, and take his yoke upon you. And don’t be worried about your life. So the first reality that we want to ruminate on to dispel worry from our mind is thinking about who our master is and this blessed command that he has given us.
The second point, the second reality that we want to ruminate on is our composition or your composition. Jesus makes this point when he asks us the first of several rhetorical questions at the end of verse 25. He says, is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
In the Greek language, there are multiple words for the word life, translated into the English word life. One of those is zoe. That word refers to physical life or often spiritual transcendent life, eternal life that we have in God. Another Greek word for life is bios, where we get our word biology. It also refers to physical life, biological life.
Jesus doesn’t use either of these words here. Instead, he uses the word psuche, which there may be a footnote in your Bible that also indicates that that’s the word for soul. Instead of those other two words, he uses the word psuche here, which refers also to the life of a person. Zoe is used far more extensively in the New Testament, while psuche is used really only a handful of times.
And it seems like on the face of it, it would be more natural to use a word referring to physical life here, when Jesus is talking about food and clothing. But he doesn’t. Rather, he uses this word psuche, because this word is a comprehensive term that encompasses all of a person’s being, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Jesus here is referring to life in the fullest sense possible.
So while we are often only concerned about the physical and the material, Jesus broadens our perspective out to the immaterial. He wants to remind us that there’s more to life than food and clothing. There’s more to us than just the physical body. Jesus knew that man was composed both of body and soul, what we call the psychosomatic union. And Jesus knew the detrimental effects of worry on the soul, the internal aspect of man, but also on the body.
When we are tempted to worry, we must also consider the detrimental effects that it has on the whole of our life. We are composed of both a body and a soul. They’re united in one, and the one affects the other. The effects of worry which start in the immaterial aspect of man, they result in anxious feelings within our material body that we physically feel.
These result in detrimental effects on the physical body that are well attested in the medical world. God knew this, but people of Jesus’ day most certainly didn’t know the extent of this, but God knew this and Jesus wrote to his people then to consider these things; that we are composed of a body and a soul. They affect one another. We have to take this into account.
We want to want to take just a few moments here to consider those effects that the immaterial worry in our minds have on our physical body. Chronic worry and anxiety, they trigger a constant fight-or-flight response in a person, which floods the body with hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that over time damage multiple organ systems.
The first one is the cardiovascular system. This can result in high blood pressure as adrenaline and cortisol constrict blood vessels. They speed up the heart rate leading to hypertension over time. It can lead to heart disease. Constant cardiovascular strain raises the long-term risk of coronary events, heart attacks, and even stroke.
All these things are tied to people who are anxious and worried. It also affects the digestive system. It can, on a lesser level, just provide gut discomfort. Stress from anxiety actually pauses non-essential functions like digestion, leading to acid reflux, heartburn, and stomach pain or it can lead to worse things, irritable bowel syndrome.
Anxiety alters the gut motility, which basically means your internal organs, the intestines, they aren’t able to move as they should. There’s wave-like movements that keep everything in your body moving, and worry and anxiety disrupts that, leading to much worse symptoms than just gut discomfort. We’ll leave out all the gory details of what those entail. You can imagine them.
It also affects the immune and inflammatory systems. Anxiety and worry can lead to a suppressed immune system. Prolonged hormone exposure weakens the immune system, making the body more vulnerable to everyday infections. It can lead to increased inflammation.
Worry triggers the little protein messengers in our body called cytokines that basically tell your body where there’s a problem, there’s an infection in a certain place that triggers your body to respond. So basically, worry triggers a false alarm in your body that something’s wrong, and it calls for inflammation where there really is no problem.
It also affects our nervous and musculoskeletal system. It causes tension and headaches. Muscles stay contracted for long periods of time, causing chronic neck pain, back aches, tension, headaches. It disrupts our sleep. A racing mind prevents deep sleep and it results in fatigue, dizziness, cognitive exhaustion.
It also affects the respiratory system. It affects breathing patterns. Anxiety alters breathing, causing it to become shallow, rapid, short. This hyperventilation can lead to dizziness, lightheadedness, numbness in the extremities due to an unbalance of oxygen and carbon dioxide levels.
And it even exacerbates chronic conditions. If you have asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, it exacerbates those things and can trigger severe and acute attacks or other systems of the body. It can make your weight fluctuate. Chronic cortisol exposure can slow down your metabolism, elevate blood sugar, and increase blood fats, which lead to weight gain and even obesity.
It also can cause rash and hives. Anxiety directly causes and worsens a variety of skin problems. When cortisol and adrenaline are released, they can cause microscopic changes that for some people show up as rashes and hives. These are some of the known and documented effects, physical effects, that anxiety has on the physical body.
We are, beloved, composed of both soul and body. They’re deeply and profoundly connected. There’s a lot more to our physical bodies than food and clothing. Life in the fullest sense, the inner man in the physical body, there’s a lot more to it that we have to take into consideration.
The people of Jesus’s day, they didn’t know all of this. God did. And Jesus is so kind to free them with this command, because he knows how detrimental worry and anxiety is to one’s entire life. We might ask the same question Jesus asked here a little bit differently in light of what we talked about.
We can consider how foolish it is to worry about daily issues of food and clothing, if that worry might kill us, or it might inhibit your ability to do anything else. I mean, this list of things that I mentioned is like watching one of those commercials of medication that has a 45-second list of all the side effects.
I know that you’ve heard those, seen those, of which one of those side effects is death. I remember we saw one of those commercials one time, and one of my kids said, why would you take that if the side effect is death or a long list of these other miserable results? Many of those are for anxiety, and many of those are also for the things that anxiety causes, like rashes and gut problems.
But what is the point of worrying about what you are going to eat tomorrow, if worrying about that pauses your digestion, and you can’t even digest the food you’ve got today? That’s ironic, isn’t it? And tragic. But let’s go back to our illustration of the teaspoon of water being turned into four billion water droplets that creates a dense fog.
When we turn, when we have this one little problem that we worry about, we turn this one little problem, when we spread it out in a four billion water droplets, we really, not only are we doing that, but we really are multiplying our problems, because it results in many of these things that we talked about.
And when we are tempted to worry, we do need to consider the reality of our composition, that we are both body and soul, and one affects the other. And whatever problem that we have, that we worry about, worrying about this one problem, or sometimes it’s not even a real problem, it’s just a potential problem.
When we worry about that one thing, we are multiplying it possibly into many other problems, damaging our own bodies, and making us ineffective and unfruitful. We can’t serve our master as faithfully as we would otherwise be able to. Jesus puts the simple need for food and clothing into the larger perspective of all of life. There’s a lot more to your life than food and clothing.
And I think there’s still a little bit more that we can consider before we move on. Beyond these physical effects, worry and anxiety, they also have a detrimental effect on life and our relationships. Jesus, here, he makes his address to, really, it’s to his people, his disciples, not to unbelievers, but he makes his address here with plural pronouns. And he’s not setting this in the context of an individual problem, the people struggle with in isolation from one another.
This is true of everything that he’s talked about in the Sermon on the Mount. We are to consider this, our worry, in conjunction with the community that we live in. No one’s anxiety only affects them. When someone is anxious, they’re more prone to irritability, because the nervous system is always on edge, because of all these chronic, the adrenaline and cortisol being pumped into our system, the nervous system is always on edge. And every slight little thing can be irritating.
We can much more easily snap and lash out in anger at our loved ones. We’re more prone to be hypersensitive and defensive over minor disagreements. This can, worry and anxiety, can create relational distance. When you are so preoccupied in your mind with this one little thing, when you’ve blown it up into a fog in your own mind, you can’t see anything else. You’re distracted from serving your family well, loving your family, giving them the attention that they need.
There’s a whole realm of anxiety called social anxiety, that fear of man, fear what others think, which leads to anxiety, and that also destroys relationships. Proverbs 29:5 says, “The fear of man brings a snare, but the one who trusts in the Lord will be protected.” Worrying about what others think about you, how to act so maybe people will like you, etc. It’s really setting a trap for yourself.
Because number one, you can’t please everyone. In the end, the one who tries to be liked by everybody will offend everybody and be liked by nobody, and end up with no friends. So beloved, Jesus is trying to tell us here, there’s a lot more to life than food and clothing. There’s more to life than people liking you. There’s more to life than whatever this thing is that you’re prone to worry about. Consider the reality of your composition, your psychosomatic union, and the destruction that worry and anxiety bring upon you.
That whatever that you’re tempted to worry about or prone to worry about, that the worry is far worse for you than whatever that thing is you might be afraid would come true. So when you’re tempted to be worried about anything, we want to consider the reality of our commander, his good command. We don’t have to be enslaved to that. We can take our burden to the good shepherd, take his yoke upon us.
Anxiety and worry cripple us from serving our master faithfully.” Bret Hastings
And the second reality we consider is the reality of our composition, how worry affects and is detrimental to every aspect of our life, physical, spiritual. Weary is far worse for you than anything you worry about. It’s sin, and it sidelines us, it distracts us, it hinders our fruitfulness as his servants. We want to abide in him and be fruitful.
That brings us to the third point this morning, your class. The reality that we want to consider to renew our mind with is our class. Look at verse 26. Jesus says, “Look at the birds of the air that they do not sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?”
Jesus makes this point again with his question. First, he’s drawing a comparison of value and worth between two classes of creature, birds and people. Among all the animals that were allowed to be brought for sacrifice, birds were the cheapest. They were the sacrifice for those who couldn’t afford a ram or a bull.
But also, this is just a very generic word for bird that refers to that which flies. It’s from the same root word as the verb to fly. In Acts 11:-/6, when Peter explains the sheet -coming down and God commanded him to eat, he protested saying, nothing unclean has ever entered into me. He uses this word for birds there. So, this could refer to even unclean birds.
In Luke’s account of Jesus’ teaching, this teaching, probably another teaching at another occasion, but the same truth, Jesus uses the word ravens instead of this generic word for birds. Ravens were not just less valuable, they were unclean and a sign of God’s judgment, totally worthless in the economy of Israel.
While some birds were a dime a dozen, others were worth nothing at all. Jesus is comparing us, as human beings to these, this creature, these birds. We as human beings are in a very different class of creature. We have a far greater intrinsic worth because we have been made in the image of God.
This isn’t just a comparison of like, oh, Jesus cares for the birds over here, so he’s going to care for me, another creature. No, this is like the difference between the care that you have for your house plant, which we can never keep alive at my house, is the difference between the care you have for a house plant and the care that you have for the little human beings running around in your house.
You probably regularly miss a day of watering, at least that’s why ours might not stay alive. You probably regularly miss watering or feeding your fish or your dog or your cat, but you don’t do that with your spouse or your kids. You don’t say, ah, they’ll survive. And maybe you say, well, yeah, but that’s because my kids wouldn’t let me forget to feed them. They always are there.
Well, you’re just making my point. They’re a completely different class of creature. They are rational beings able to express what they want and what they need. And being made in the image of God means that we are infinitely more valuable than all those other creatures, all those birds, because we are imbued with the image of God, the glory of God that he has set upon us, that we fill the earth with as we multiply.
So when Jesus says, consider the birds, it’s not just a one-to-one comparison. If you were to put all of every bird on the planet, every creature on the planet on on the scale on this side and you on the scale on this side, you are infinitely more valuable. There’s still no contest, because you have been made in the image of God. It’s a much greater disparity between the human and the bird than between, you might say, the life of a dear pet that you love and some insect, some spider or ant.
If you had to choose, if your dog was drowning in a pool and there was an ant in the pool drowning and you had to pick one to save, which one are you going to save? There’s no question about that. There’s an even greater disparity between all of the birds and us in God’s mind. There’s no comparison.
So if God feeds the birds, beloved, how much more so will he not feed you, care for you? But this also brings us to the second aspect of our class. Not only are we in a different class of creature, but we’re in a different class of people.
Every human being has infinite value and worth before God compared to the rest of the creatures. But there’s an even more prominent class to be in and that is to be a son of the Father. Look at verse 26 again. “Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?” The difference is not just between two classes of creature, but between those who are God’s children and the rest of fallen and unredeemed humanity.
So if you set food out in a bird feeder, which many people don’t do that anymore, but if you do that, you just as a human being, you put food out for the birds that fly, you’re certainly going to feed your own children. You might even feed that annoying neighbor kid who’s hungry, but you’re not going to do it at the expense of your own children. When it comes to your own children, you’ve got a lot of blood, sweat, and tears invested in your own kids. You’ve got a relationship with your own kids that you don’t have with anyone else’s kids.
So if you are prone to worry, or worry comes into your mind, anxious thoughts, consider that the creator of the universe, he cares for the billions and trillions of creatures on the earth. And if he takes care of them, will he not take care of you? He provides food for trillions of creatures every day. How much more valuable are you, not just as another creature, but as one of his children?
He further makes this argument on the next page in chapter 7. I just have to look across the page in my Bible, but if you have to turn your page, look at chapter 7 verses 7 through 11. He fleshes this out further a little bit later. He says, “Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you.
“For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you when his son asks for a loaf will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask him? Therefore, in all things, whatever you want people to do for you, so do for them. This is all in the law and the prophets.”
Even evil, unbelieving parents, even us as believers, we know how to give our children the things that they ask for. Even though we can still be selfish and put our needs over other peoples, we still give our children the things that they need, the things that they ask for.
How much more perfect is God? How much more valuable are you to God than the birds as his children? Even over all the other fallen unredeemed humanity, the Lord loves us in a very special and particular way, and will care for us just like you would care for your own children.
Take your Bible with me and just turn over to 1 Peter chapter 1, where we see how God gives us at least a way to quantify our value in his eyes as his children. Peter begins in verse 17, “If you address God as your father.” This, I mentioned earlier, this whole section is for believers. If you do not know him as Lord and Savior, if he is not your Father, he still does care for you above all the other creatures, but you need to repent. You need to put your trust in him or you will be enslaved to your worry and your anxiety.
But Peter here, he helps us out; how to think and renew our minds with this. 1 Peter chapter 1, beginning in verse 17, I’ll read through verse 21. Peter says, “and if you address as Father the one who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your sojourn, knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things like silver or gold from your feudal conduct inherited from your forefathers,
“but you were redeemed with precious blood as of a lamb, unblemished and spotless, that is the blood of Christ. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but appeared in these last times for the sake of you, who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory so that your faith and hope are in God.”
I love how here Peter speaks of silver and gold as if they were perishable like just any other perishable food that if you leave it on the counter will spoil like milk or meat. To these people, silver and gold were some of the most imperishable things known to the ancient world and as such, they were the most valuable.
But Peter here speaks of gold and silver, as if they’re just going to burn up with the grass that’s here today and gone tomorrow. And he says that you, as a redeemed child of God, you were not purchased with something so perishable and invaluable as gold and silver. Rather, you were purchased with the infinite valuable blood of Jesus Christ, the life of the precious and only Son of God.
Flip over with me to Romans chapter 8. Romans chapter 8 begins with that glorious truth that “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ.” Even though we are weak and frail and we still are anxious and worried, even though we continue to disobey our master and our commander and we succumb to worry and anxiety, there’s no condemnation for us who are in Christ. We’re forgiven fully and finally in Christ. And more than that, He hasn’t left us to ourselves. He helps us in our weakness.
Look at verse 26, and I’m going to just read through the end of the chapter. You can’t stop there. Verse 26, “and in the same way, the Spirit also helps us in our weakness. For we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
“And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose, because those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers. Those whom He predestined, He also called, and those whom He called, He also justified, and those whom He justified, He also glorified.
“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who indeed did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies. Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.
“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or turmoil or persecution or famine, nakedness, peril, or sword. That is,” even if all the things that you worry about come true, verse 36, “just as it is written, for your sake we are being put to death all day long. We are counted as sheep for the slaughter, but in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.”
And He says these glorious truths, “for I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, or any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Beloved, if you are prone to worry, when you, even if you don’t regularly worry, when those things come into your mind and your heart, remind yourself of these blessed truths, these realities. You’re his child. He’s given you the Holy Spirit to help you in your weakness. All the trials that he brings into your life that are maybe causing worry, he’s done so for your good to make you more like Christ. So don’t worry about the future. Your good Heavenly Father has ordained all these things for you.
And whatever you think it is that maybe you lack, that you worry about, that makes you anxious, just remember he didn’t spare His own son to deliver you, to redeem you. And he did so that you might live for him. And if he did that, if he didn’t spare his own son, will he not also now freely give you whatever it is that you need? Jesus Christ died to purchase your life, and now he’s raised at the right hand of God, interceding on your behalf.
You have Christ who died for you. He sacrificed his own life for you, sitting next to the father, interceding on your behalf. When you ask for something, He’s there asking for the father to give it to you. And the father will not will not turn down his own son’s requests. He does this, his general care for the world. He does this for the most insignificant of creatures. He does this for his sinful enemies, fallen unredeemed humanity that are set at odds against him.
In common grace, he cares for them. How much more will he not love you and care for you, dear one? We have no reason to worry. All of our worry has to be set in these realities. We must trust our Heavenly Father with the whole of our life, every aspect; that he is sovereign, sits on the throne. He loves us. He gave his own son for us. He will supply for our every need.
We have to remember our composition, our body and our soul, and how when we worry, it totally sidelines us from being faithful to him. It really destroys our life. We have to seek to pour our hearts out to him, cast all of our cares upon him. We have to see this as a gracious and good command from Him to not worry, not be anxious about anything. We have to trust and obey him, beloved. So let us, as we have those worrisome, anxious thoughts enter into our minds, let us ruminate on these realities and let us trust and obey.
Let’s pray. Father, you are so good. If the whole ocean was full of ink, if every quill turned into a pen, if every piece of paper laid out, we could write of your goodness towards us and it would never cease. We could write of your goodness forever. Lord, help us. You have given the Spirit as a helper to help us. So we just ask that your Spirit would bring these realities to mind when we are tempted to worry, to anxiety. We can’t do this on our own. We are weak and frail.
Our hearts are often dull. And we beg of You, Lord, to strengthen us for these things. Remind us of these glorious truths, that you, who did not spare Your Son, gave His blood to redeem us. All of the things that we worry about are far less. Help us to trust you more every day. This is going to be a lifelong battle against the things of this world, the things that plague our minds and we just ask, Lord, that you would remind us of these truths to turn the problems that we magnify in our minds back into the small problems that they are in light of the gospel and in light of who you are as our sovereign savior. We pray and ask these things in your name. Amen.