A Year-Long Exploration of the Sermon on the Mount: Week 42

Chapter 42 – Beyond Worry

 

‘“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. 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 worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.’ (Matthew 6:25-32)

 

Do not worry. This is the message from Jesus in this bit of his sermon on the mount. Do not worry. Not exactly the easiest statement. It is in our human nature to worry – about food, clothing, money, other people, etc. We humans worry about everything! What Jesus wants us to do is lay our worries at God’s feet. Hand our worries over to God and let God do the worrying. Easy as pie, right? Ha!

 

It's not easy, but it can be done. Through prayer, we can lay out our worries and ask God to walk with us, to help us carry the burden so that some of the weight can be lifted. We can pray to God to help us find someone willing to share the burden with us. We can talk it out with our family and/or our friends. We can release our worries to our therapist or our psychiatrist. There are many ways that we can use to relieve ourselves of the worry that we have in our hearts.

 

And sometimes, we need to realize that there are worries that we can’t do anything about. We can only control what we can control. Anything else is out of our hands. It’s of these things that Jesus calls out to us, “Do not worry.” Knowing the difference between what is and is not in our control will mean the difference between crumbling under the worry and working our way through it.