Anxiety, Fear, Worry and the Gospel of Grace Matthew 6:25-34 Introduction The passage from the Sermon on the Mount that we’re going to unpack together this morning is found in Matt 6:25-34. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get right to it. <Read the text> The main point of the text: a command not to worry, but instead to seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness. Now if you really listen to what Jesus is saying here, you should be amazed. Jesus condemns worry. He condemns anxiety, fear, and worry. Three times in this text he commands us not to worry. Verse 25: Do not be worried about your life. Verse 31: Do not worry. And v 34: Do not worry about tomorrow. Three times Jesus condemns worry as a sin. It is wrong. It must be avoided. It must be shunned. It must be eliminated. And this, I’m saying, is amazing…because…who doesn’t worry? As one writer puts it: “Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man’s existence.” Haven’t you felt stressed? Anxious? Fearful? Haven’t you fretted over that unforeseen auto repair? That medical diagnosis? Your sixteen year-old’s dating relationship? Everyone worries. At least at one time or another, you and I have worried about someone or something. I think it’s fair to say that no one is exempt…unless… Unless you are a completely careless, carefree irresponsible person, content with carelessness and irresponsibility. Of course, Jesus is not telling us to trade anxiety for irresponsibility. That would be like trading a rotten apple for a rotten orange. Both are rotten. But even if you are a person who tends toward blowing off your responsibilities under the guise of “not being a worrier,” I’ll bet that you’ve worried at least about something at some time in your life. In fact, it’s been my experience that people who are careless and irresponsible have become that way because they couldn’t take the feeling of being anxious. So they let the pendulum swing in the complete opposite direction: “If I don’t give a rip, I don’t have to be anxious any more.”  So when Jesus emphatically condemns worry here in Matthew 6, he’s condemning something that all of us have known. He’s condemning something that seems to be a universal experience of humanity. And this, I’m saying, is an amazing thing to hear – and not simply because everyone worries, but also because it is strange to think that worry could ever be a sin. We don’t like it. Anxiety isn’t fun, but a sin? Come on, Jesus. Isn’t that a little over the top? Well, it would be were it not for the fact as you begin to peel back the layers of what we call worry or anxiety you’ll find something that’s quite sinister. Worry Is a Sin of Misplaced Values The first layer is found in the connection between worry and seeking first God’s kingdom and righteousness Now the reason why I say that there’s a connection between worry and seeking first God’s kingdom and righteousness is first that Jesus makes the connection explicitly in our text cf. vv 31-33. <Read the text> “Do not worry,” Jesus says, “but seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness.” It seems that for Jesus, the opposite of worry, or the antidote to worry is to seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness. Or to put it negatively, our worry is the fruit of a failure to seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness. Now then, what does it mean to seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness? Well, to seek first the kingdom, does not mean to seek it first in a series, but to seek it above all else. It means “to give oneself unreservedly to the pursuit of the Kingdom.” So Jesus is saying “Make the kingdom of God and his righteousness the prime ambition of your life. Orient everything else around it. Now you may remember that this is precisely what Jesus is talking about in vv 19-24. Read that with me. <Read the text> This leads to the second reason why I say that Jesus makes a connection between seeking first God’s kingdom and the sin of worry. Clearly, Jesus sees a connection cf. v 25a (“For this reason”). For him, worry is the earmark of valuing something or someone more supremely than God. That’s why Jesus laid the foundation he did in vv 19-24. If what you treasure, what illumines your life, what you serve is something other than the Lord, you will worry. If the meaning of life is found in something other than his kingdom and righteousness, then you will be full of worry. Worry is what happens when you seek something else first. You worry when what you value most is threatened. But in reality, the two questions – what do you value and what do you worry about are really the same question, just approached from different angles: you value what you worry about and you worry when what you value is threatened. I’ll say that again: you value what you worry about and you worry when what you value is threatened. So if you want to find out what you really value, what makes you tick, what you’re ten fingers and ten toes committed to, look to what makes you anxious. Fear is inverted desire. If I am afraid of being seen as an idiot, then I want to be seen as intelligent. What I value is intelligence. If I am afraid of my job’s insecurity, then I want job security. What I value is security. And on and on. The point is that if you want to find out what you really value, identify what you worry about. You value what you worry about. But you also worry when what you value is threatened. If I value my children’s welfare, then I worry when they are in danger. If I value my livelihood, then I worry when there are company layoffs. If I value my reputation, then I worry when people think ill of me. Again, we could go on and on. The point here is that you worry when what you value is threatened. Now because only God truly worth valuing and because he is completely unassailable (he can’t be moth-eaten or rust-ridden or stolen), worry must be the fruit of valuing something other than God, which is the chief sin – living for something or someone other than the true God. This leads to the next thing about worry that makes it so sinister. Worry is not only a sin of misplaced values, it is also a sign of unbelief. Worry Is a Sign of Unbelief As Calvin has said, Unbelief is the mother of every anxiety. Worry is a faith issue. People who worry do not trust the true and living God. And in the absence of trusting God, we trust false gods. And, of course, this should make us anxious. Our false gods are powerless to help us when things go rough…because they’re not real. They are the figment of our imagination cf. 1 Kgs 18:17-39. <Read the text> We make our idols – the same piece of wood that we use for the fire we fashion into a god and pray to it and serve it and hope against hope that it will deliver us from our distresses and fears and anxieties, when all they ever do is make us more distressed, fearful, and anxious. Oh, most of us don’t make dashboard idols that we give fruit and meats to – but we are idolaters nevertheless. The prophet Ezekiel talks about idols of the heart – the things we live for and long for – the things we seek above God – power, fame, sex appeal, approval, intelligence – whatever. Now whatever we live for other than God will only do two things: lower the boom or raise the bar (I owe this language to my friend Dick Kaufmann). If you fail to live up to the standard of your idol of choice, they lower the boom – make you feel guilty terrible, so you’re always trying to live up to the standard your idol sets for you from fear of it lowering the boom. On the other hand, if you do live up to the standard of your idol, if you get what you crave, it only raises the bar, it says, “Not good enough. You need more.” And so you’re anxious, too, only this time, you’re not afraid as much as you’re insecure. “Did I do enough? When is enough, enough?” But, of course, our idol of choice is simply ourselves. We love to trust ourselves. And whenever you trust yourself, you cannot trust God at the same time. The moment your faith shifts from God to self, your faith in God lessens. It’s just the way it works. So when you worry, you are transferring your faith from God to self, and essentially telling God, that you can run the universe better than he can, so you’ll take it from here cf. 1 Pet 5:6-7. <Read the text> Anxiety is a form of pride. It’s telling God that you can run the universe better than he can. It’s a form of self-reliance. Really, it’s a form of self-righteousness. Pride is the hope you put in your own righteousness. Humility is the hope you put in Christ’s righteousness. Anxiety is the realization that your own righteousness isn’t enough; it’s the realization that you can’t rely on your own righteousness but still refuse to rely on Christ’s. Now one of the things that makes anxiety so sinister is that it is worse than plain, old, ordinary self-reliance because the overtly self-reliant person is a num-num. You think that you’ve really got the tiger by the tail, like life really is within your grasp, under your control – that you’ve got things under control. You have had a very charmed life, then. And you don’t read the news. You’re oblivious. In a moment, you’re life could go spinning out of control – natural disaster, economic collapse, terminal illness, relational catastrophe. You can’t control these things. You should be worried. Worried people at least have something right. Life is scary. Life is big and scary and a million terrible things can happen. But precisely because they understand that life is outside of their control makes their worry a worse species of pride than the overt self-reliant kind. You know that life is beyond your control, but instead of yielding to the unbending reality of that and entrusting yourself to the sovereign God, the one who is in control of all the unwieldy things of life, you do not trust him and choose instead to keep all those things within your own grasp. Your worry shows that you know you can’t handle life but that you nevertheless refuse to turn it over to the one who can. You can turn back to Matthew 6. So worry is sinful – it is a sin of misplaced values and a sign of unbelief. Now at this point you may be thinking that by condemning worry, Jesus is telling us to be thoughtless and unconcerned and oblivious to life. What Worry Isn’t (and Still More on What It Is) Worry is not legitimate concern. Worry is not carelessness and irresponsibility. Like you’re a surfer or perpetual student or one of those playboys with a trust fund. Where too many things “just roll of your back.” You don’t worry because you don’t care. Not caring is not not worrying. Not caring is not caring. The same is true for refusing to work. Laziness is not trusting God to provide for your needs. Laziness is laziness, a form of unbelief itself. It doesn’t trust that God’s main provision for your needs is through your work! Cans of Campbell’s soup are not going to fall from the sky to deliver you and your loved ones from hunger when left and right he’s offered you gainful employment that you’ve just refused. It’s like that old joke about the guy in a flood. Worry is not planning for the future. Worry is fretting about the future. Getting yourself, as my father used to say, worked up into a lather about the future. It is being preoccupied with the future. Or even being preoccupied with the past. It is kicking yourself for what an idiot you were and rehearsing in your mind over and over and over again what you should have said but didn’t, or what you can’t believe you said, but did. Worry is scurrying around like a little rodent or marsupial or whatever squirrels are. They always look jumpy. You’re jumpy. Is my portfolio enough? Will my 401K allow me to retire in style? Will my kids make it? Is my baby’s fever a sign of meningitis? Is this persistent cough a symptom of cancer? What if I die a horrible death?  But perhaps the thing that makes worry so sinister is that it is a kind of maternal sin – it gives birth to a thousand others. You know what a number worry does on you. You know it when you see it. You know it when you experience it. And you know it’s wrong. You know that worry is bad for you. Your body tells you: ulcers, zits, eczema, nausea, heart palpitations, hyperventilation, knot in your stomach. Your fingernails tell you. Your behavior tells you. You procrastinate. You’re preoccupied, irritable, depressed, scared, paranoid, pessimistic, superstitious, impatient, overly organized, overly disorganized, bossy, short, overly scrupulous, lazy, lustful, argumentative (esp. about money and material things), drunk, high. You name it! Worry is a kind of maternal sin – it gives birth to lots of offspring. Well then, Jesus here forbids worry for the sin that it is, and tells us instead to get our priorities right. Focus on the kingdom of God and his righteousness. That is, orient your life around what really matters – God’s rule. Submit yourself to what he’s doing in your life and what he wants to do through you in the world. And as you do that, put all your hope in his righteousness. The righteousness which is a gift from him. The record you need to be acceptable to him – the comprehensively perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. Seek his righteousness. Trust his righteousness and not your own record, or resume, or power to control the circumstances of your life through your own ingenuity or intelligence or wisdom or whatever. Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness. In other words, make all God is for you in the gospel the prime pursuit of your life, and you’ll have what you need. You’ll have what you need to seek first his kingdom and righteousness. You’ll have what you need. God will provide it for you. Or as C S Lewis put it: seek heaven and get earth thrown in. Seek earth, and you’ll have neither. Are Christians Promised a Fat and Happy Life? Now it’s important that I pause here to tell you what Jesus is not saying. He’s not saying, “I’ll give you health and wealth and prosperity, if you put me first. Everything that a non-believer would ever want will be yours, if you seek me first.” This is not at all what Jesus is saying. And I’m certain that I’m right because of what Jesus says right here in the Sermon on the Mount and what he says elsewhere in Matthew (and the rest of the NT for that matter) cf. 5:10-12; 10:16-22; 24:9-10. You can turn back to Matthew 6.  Christians starve. Christians are starving every day. Even their children starve. Christians go without clothes and food and shelter…even to their deaths every single day of the week. So what Jesus is saying that you will have what you need to seek his kingdom and his righteousness, and that pursuit may lead to your death by starvation. Are Christians Called to Retreat from the World? Jesus is also not calling us (and this drives me batty) to volunteer more hours at church or to leave our so-called secular employments to do something for Jesus – as if seeking his kingdom and righteousness excluded lawful vocations or could be reduced to service in the local church. First Thessalonians 4:11 says, “To make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands.” This is serving God. This is a kingdom and righteousness letter from the Apostle Paul. This is one of the ways you seek first his kingdom and righteousness – to be diligent, to mind your own business, to make a difference in the world for the common good, no matter what you do – from entrepreneurial enterprises to homemaking. But more to the point, in Matt 5:13-16 Jesus calls us to be salt and light. We can’t possibly do this if we’re never in the world. So again the main point of vv 25-34 is pretty straightforward: “Don’t worry, but seek first his kingdom and righteousness and God will give you what you need.” But clearly Jesus doesn’t do this. In fact, hardly any of the text is taken up with the commands themselves. Most of the text is taken up with reasons why we can live worry-free lives of faith and devotion to God, all of which have to do with our understanding of who God really is for us in the gospel. Why We Don’t Have to Worry You see, the command not to worry is not a sort of angry, mean-spirited, irritated command: “Get off your butts and get with the program, you worry-warts! Get your priorities straight!” Instead, the demand not to worry is what I’ll call a “comfort command.” Like “Don’t cry,” or “Feel better,” or “Be safe.” Yes, Jesus is commanding us not to worry. Worry is a sin. Worry is the fruit of misplaced values and hidden pride. But Jesus is also saying, “You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to be afraid.” Jesus is saying that once you see what God is like and all he is for you through the gospel, your worry will evaporate. And I’ve chosen the word “evaporate” very carefully. I first wrote “vanish.” But vanish has the implication of something that takes place instantaneously. Overcoming worry doesn’t work like that. Worry is overcome (really like most of the sins in our life) in a process. As you see all that God is for you in the gospel, slowly but surely the puddle of your anxiety will dry up. So what Jesus is saying is that at bottom, anxiety is a problem that is rooted in a flawed understanding of the character and ways of God. Get clear on all God is for you in the gospel, straighten that out, and you’ve really begun to make a dent in your worry. This, incidentally, is why so many other methods we use to comfort ourselves and others come up short: (1) thoughtless optimism, a kind of carelessness. “Don’t worry. Be happy.” “Everything’s gonna be alright”; (2) logic and the statistical improbability of such-and-such a thing happening to you; (3) distraction – “You’ve gotta do something to get your mind off it.” (4) plan and scheme with the person to show them that they have things well enough under control; (5) tell them you’ll always be there for them (you won’t!). None of these things are real encouragements because none of them direct us to the gospel. But Jesus, the master-teacher and gospel preacher knows better, so he gives us two reasons, rooted in all God is for us in the gospel, why we don’t have to worry: First, you don’t have to worry because God is in control of all of life…including yours (vv 25-30). How do we know this? Four lines of evidence: He gave you your very life (v 25). This is a “how much more than” argument. If God gave you life itself (the big thing), won’t he give you the lesser thing (food and clothing)? He takes care of the birds (v 26). Therefore he’ll take care of you. He ordains the number of your days (v 27). Psalm 139:16 says, “Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.” You are invincible until God takes you out; therefore, worrying won’t help you. Therefore, you don’t have to worry. He clothes the grass of the field (vv 28-30). Therefore, he’ll sustain your life. Deep down we all have a sense of this. Nature tells it to us. We see it every day, if we’re looking, in countless other examples. And even if we’re not yet Christians, we explain life this way. How many times have you said to yourself or someone else, especially in the midst of difficulty something like, “Everything happens for a reason”?  Now things can only happen for a reason if there’s a purpose behind them. And there can only be a purpose if there’s a person or intelligence intending something. And what Jesus is reminding us of here is that the person or intelligence behind life itself – its creation and sustenance – is none other than the one true God. Since he is in control of all of life, we don’t have to worry. He’ll take care of us. Second, and this is perhaps the more significant of the two reasons: you don’t have to worry because the God who is in control of all of life is your heavenly father cf. v 26 and especially vv 31-32. Now the reason I say that this may be the more significant of the two reasons is that the sovereignty of God alone can sometimes not only fail to comfort us in our worry. It can positively make us more anxious. If we don’t join the sovereignty of God with his other attributes – his compassion, mercy, grace, and fatherly love, then we will be afraid that the things that he brings into our lives may hurt us or otherwise destroy us. But when we know that the God who is in control of all of life is also our loving, merciful, compassionate heavenly father – everything changes. Gentiles (the pagans), the non-believers don’t have this assurance. Gentiles are orphans. They don’t have a heavenly father; they are subject to the whims of capricious gods who make them cut themselves and destroy themselves…for nothing. And because they are orphans, they eagerly seek food and drink and clothes. They look for security in the here and now, in the tangible. But Christians – we are not orphans. We are the very children of the heavenly father who knows what we need before we ask him. This is immensely encouraging. Listen to Jesus from Matt 10:29-31: “Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows.” Again, this doesn’t mean that we won’t die or suffer or have trouble in this world, but it means that whatever difficulty we face comes with God’s knowledge and consent. And therefore he is able to give us what we need to face it, even if what we need is the courage to die well. The point here, and the real comfort of knowing that God is in control of all of life is that the God who is in control of all of life is our heavenly father. The real antidote to anxiety, fear, and worry is to know that you are valued, that you are loved. If we know that we are valued far above every sparrow, our anxieties will vanish. The root of our fear is that we do not believe that we are beloved to a heavenly father. You worry because you don’t believe you are his child; because you do not see him as your father; because you don’t see your status as his child as a permanent thing. You did nothing to earn it. Therefore you can do nothing to lose it! Now the reason you may not believe you are his child is that you aren’t yet his child. But it may also be that you are a believer of “little faith,” that you struggle to remember who you are, whose you are and all that that really means. Unless you know you have a heavenly Father, who knows what you need before you ask, who knows you need food and clothing, whose eye is on the sparrow, who had numbered the very hairs of your head (as easy or difficult as that may be for some of us), to rehearse your worries in prayer will only make you more worried. It’s like telling someone to think about everything that stresses them out! Why on earth would you do that?! You want to get your mind off your troubles, not on them! But Peter’s (and Paul’s) admonishments to pray through our worries – to bring them before the Lord presuppose what Jesus presupposes here in the Sermon on the Mount and what he makes explicit in this passage; namely, that your father loves you and wants what’s best for you and therefore you can trust him. He loves to relieve your burdens! I love how Lloyd-Jones puts it: “If only we realized God’s loving concern for us, that He knows everything about us, and is concerned about the smallest detail of our lives!” You will never be anywhere but that He sees you; there will never be anything in the depths of your heart, in the innermost recesses of your being but that He knows all about it….He not only sees what is happening to you when you are taken ill, He not only knows when you are suffering bereavement and sorrow, He knows every pang of the heart, He knows every heartache. He knows everything; there is nothing outside His omniscience. He knows all about us in every respect and He therefore knows our every need. From that our Lord draws this deduction. You need never be anxious, you must never be worried. God is with you in this state, you are not alone, and He is your Father. Even an earthly father does this in a measure. He is with his child, protecting, doing everything he can for him. Multiply that by infinity, and that is what God is doing with respect to you, whatever your circumstance.  Conclusion So if you are a Christian, you don’t have to worry. The God who is in control of all of life is your heavenly father. And he wants to bless you even more than you want to be blessed. You can trust him. You can seek first his kingdom and his righteousness. He’s worth it. All he is for you in the gospel proves it! And because of this, Jesus ends where he does – in v 34. Read it with me. <Read the text> You can almost see a smile on his face as he delivers it. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Let tomorrow worry about tomorrow. Each day has enough trouble of its own. In context, what Jesus is saying is this: Anxiety about tomorrow is foolish because your all-powerful, all-knowing, compassionate father is Lord of the future. If each day has enough trouble of its own (and it does), then, rest assured, God is more than enough to be with you in the midst of that trouble. So don’t worry. You don’t have to. The gospel proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that God, your father loves you more than words can say. “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?”  This text is about “living in the present instead of crippling the present by fear of the imagined future.” The problem with imagining the future is that you don’t have a good enough imagination to envision all the possibilities. Just think about your life over the last ten years. Could you have predicted it? Or were you surprised? How many of the really big things that have happened in your life have you imagined? And even if a dream has come true for you, it has come true in unanticipated ways. There were aspects that you could not have foreseen or otherwise imagined. _________________ You might think, “How