Seek First His Kingdom And His Righteousness

So this morning, we're going to be continuing in our study of the Sermon on the Mount, and today's topic is anxiety or worry. And so it's a bit of a topical sermon. This is the sort of topic that is easy to brush off, thinking that it doesn't apply to us, because the things that we worry about are, after all, legitimate. We have good reason to worry about them or to be concerned about them. Maybe our worry goes by a different name. Maybe we don't call it worry. Maybe we call it stewardship or it's... It's a concern or it's love. The passage that we're going to be studying deals with our worrying in a few particulars. Though in another place, in Philippians, Paul tells us not to be anxious for anything. And so the things that we're going to study this morning don't apply just to food and clothing and shelter, but to all of life. The things Jesus says are applicable to every instance of our anxiety or our worry. If you want to know what the point of the sermon would be at the beginning, I'll tell you.

There's no circumstance on this earth where worry is the thing you should do. It's never justifiable. It's never like, oh, well, now it would be okay. That's the point of the sermon. What I hope is to be able to show you from the passage why you shouldn't worry, though. Because it's one thing to say you shouldn't worry and another thing to see why you shouldn't worry. And so my hope this morning is that God will help us to see the areas in our lives where we aren't trusting him as we should. and that he would bring us to faith concerning them. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord? This is from Matthew 6, verses 25 to 34. It is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. 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 who of you, by being worried, can add a single hour to his life? 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 the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all 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 care for itself.

Each day has enough trouble of its own. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, as we start, there's one thing I want to point out to you, that there's a way of twisting this passage or abusing it to mean something or to justify sin or a failure and say, well, the Bible says that we shouldn't worry about that, so I'm not going to worry about it. At the very beginning, it says, do not be worried about your life. What's not being communicated here is to make no plan, no provision, or to have no... no awareness that tomorrow comes after today and next year comes after this year. When Jesus tells us not to worry, he's not telling us to be careless, to be unaware of our needs or our future responsibilities. That's not what's being said here. If that were the case, then Paul's teaching in Ephesians, where he tells the one who steals to steal no longer, but rather to work, performing work with his own hands, doing what is good, would make no sense. Why should we work?

Why should we think about the future? Is there any place for us to prepare for tomorrow or next year or when our kids are out of the home or what have you? If we misread this passage, you'd say, no, I don't need to worry about any of that stuff. I don't even need to think about it. That's not what Jesus is saying here. What's being addressed here, the worry or the anxiety, is an excessive worry, a debilitating worry, a useless worry, a destructive worry. And so while we shouldn't worry about our lives, we should work to provide for the necessities of our lives. And so don't take this passage and use it as a justification for being careless, for being unconcerned. You know, there's this, you guys know what YOLO means? This is not the scriptural justification for YOLO, right? You only live once, which means seize the day, right? Carpe diem, let's just live for today, for tomorrow we die. That sort of mentality is condemned in scripture.

And the people who embody that sort of lifestyle are not Christians. The ones who live for today, for tomorrow we die, who only live once, are wrong. This world is not all there is. And when we leave this world, we're not finished. And so there are preparations, not only for the rest of our lives here on earth, but for eternity, that we do need to make. And we do need to attend to. And so you ought to prepare for the future. You ought to consider what's coming. And you ought to act in accordance with what you expect to happen. But you shouldn't worry about it or be anxious about it or fret or wring your hands over it. That's what Jesus is warning us away from, excessive or inappropriate worry. I think many times worry and anxiety stand as indicators.

at least to us and we hope to other people or we expect to other people, that our worry and our anxiety actually are the things that indicate we really care about something. Have you ever said or heard someone say, well, if I don't worry about it, nobody will. If I don't stay up half the night fretting, there'll be no one else to do it. What do you say to the person? You say, good, it would be good if no one stayed up half the night worrying about it. Preparing for it, yes. Planning, sure. Worrying, no. And so our worry and our anxiety are not indications of our great concern for what's happening currently or what might happen in the future. Our worry does not mean we care. It's important here as we talk about worry and anxiety, I told you at the beginning, we're supposed to not worry or be anxious. But Jesus here actually tells us why.

He gives us two examples as to why we're not supposed to worry or be anxious. And these are the things that we have to slow down and pay careful attention to because these are our Lord's reasons why you shouldn't worry. These are not my reasons. These are God's reasons. This is what Jesus said about why you shouldn't worry. He gives us two examples. The first is the birds of the air. What are we supposed to see and observe and learn when we look at the birds of the air? He tells us they don't sow. meaning they don't work for their food. They go and find it. They forage for it, but they don't plant it in the ground. They don't cultivate it. They don't reap it. They don't store it into barns. And yet they have food. And how is it that those birds have food? Because they worked really hard and went and found it? Because they worried about it? Because they beat up all the other kids like the, what is it, the angry caterpillar? What's that book? The hungry, or the ladybug. The grumpy ladybug. Is that what it's called?

It's a kid's book. You should read it. It's about adults. But it's like, what do the birds do? They depend. Having no souls and no cognitive reasoning, they just depend on God to provide for them. They don't even think about it. They just go looking for food. They go looking over here and plucking the worms out of the ground over there. They just go look for it. And there it is, provided for them. All that they need. Because God cares for them. It's worth noting here that that Jesus is very personal and very sweet in the way that he tells us that we'll be provided for. He says, look at the birds of the air. They don't sow, nor do they reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Not their creator, not their redeemer, not the God that made all things, but your heavenly Father. Your dad's going to take care of you. He's going to make sure you have what you need. And if God will feed those birds, Jesus reasons with us,

Are you not worth much more than them? Are you not worth much more to God than those birds? In another place where there's, in scripture later on in Matthew, where there are birds, sparrows being offered up for sacrifices. He says, two sparrows are sold for a cent, but not one of them falls from the sky without your heavenly father knowing. He's numbered even the hairs on your head. And so our God, our heavenly father is intimately acquainted with our needs. And he's not inclined ever to allow us to go without them being met. Now, will they be met with what we're comfortable with? Will they be met with an abundance? Will they be met with stores for the future? Perhaps not. But the psalmist also says that in his life he has never seen the righteous begging for bread. That the righteous seed never goes without what they need. And so, We should look around us. God's given us this creation. We should look around and see the birds out in our yards plucking up worms and see them making their nests and see them gathering their food and go, if God will give them all that stuff they need to live and to survive, and he gives them wings to get away from the cold because they can't survive the cold, then he will provide for me. That's actually the first reason you shouldn't worry is that God provides for people, or not people rather, but creatures of far less value than you.

So he will provide for you. The difference between birds and us, however, is that our food is tied to our work. He who doesn't work shall not eat. The birds, they get their food sort of like the Israelites received the manna. Like it just, here it comes. Like they didn't have to do anything for it other than go out and gather it up. That was extraordinary. It was extraordinary being fed that way. Our food in normal life is tied to our work. And so one of the lessons we should learn if we're worried about food or if we're worried about having enough is we should take the path over and say, am I being faithful in my work to provide what I need, to seek after what I need? Our food and our work are inextricably tied. We plant, the birds don't. We sow, the birds don't. We harvest, the birds don't. We store up, the birds don't. And we're able to do all of those things.

through work. And so it's important that we work. If we're going to worry about how to get what we need, we should immediately think as Christians, I should go to work. I should look to provide for my own needs and for the needs of those around us. That's what Paul told the one who steals in Ephesians. Go and work, performing what is good, performing with his own hands what is good, so that you will have something to share with the one who has need. And so instead of worrying, if you find that you're worried about, are we going to have enough food? You might think, well, we never worry about that, but I know that people worry about that. You should go to work to make sure that you have the things you need. You shouldn't expect it to just fall down out of heaven like manna, meaning that God has ordained to provide for us differently than he will provide for the birds, but he will provide for both. He gives us another example. The flowers of the field, the lilies of the field.

He says, what is the point of a flower, really? What utility does a flower accomplish? Most of you are probably going, none. But that's not true. Actually, the purpose of a flower is to create beauty. Is beauty necessary? Yes, it is. All of you men who think it's not necessary have had to learn better. It's necessary. And the reason it's necessary is because you see in creation God making things beautiful. And these flowers that he creates, he says, listen, you guys think Solomon was it? Like Solomon and his glory and his splendor and his wealth and his majesty? He says, you think Solomon was the thing? Look at the fields, man. Like look what God did. He covered those fields with flowers. And for how long? Like what was the point? Like their flowers are going to bloom and then they're going to go away, you know? Why did he do it? Simply because they're beautiful. Why do people plant Bradford pear trees?

They stink. They blow apart. They're nasty trees. Why do people plant them? Because for about 10 days every spring, you have a giant popcorn, like a piece of popcorn in your yard. This big, white, just beautiful flower. It just looks like, it's not even looking like a tree. It just looks like a stem with this giant bloom. And you can see it from so far away. Not like a few flowers here and there. It's just the whole thing is white. And the flowers stink. They smell terrible. You don't ever want to be downwind of them. But people plant Bradford pears. They grow and then they break and they fall apart. People won't cut them down simply because they're beautiful for a very short period of time. And so we value beauty. We see it. We recognize it. God values it. He created it. Even if it's temporary. Even if it only lasts for a moment. If God clothes the grass of the field with beauty, it's alive today and tomorrow it's thrown into the furnace. If he'll clothe...

them in such temporary ways for no other purpose other than to create beauty, will he not also clothe you? This is the argument that Jesus is making to us. If you can look around you and see beauty. I was just with, I don't know if I was with Eric or somebody, I haven't done it yet, but every spring there's these purple flowers. They grow somewhere between white and like light purple lavender and like dark purple. They're just wildflowers. They grow like along the roads. It's not uncommon for me once a year. to just stop somewhere and just cut a bunch of them on my way home and bring them home. And they only last for like a day, two days, like not long. My wife probably spends more time finding the vase and cutting them to fit and arranging them to look nice. And then like two days, they're gone. But they're beautiful flowers for that short amount of time. If God's put this kind of beauty into the world and clothed this world with this kind of beauty, will he not provide for us also? There are things where nothing grows.

And they're very ugly places. Deserts are ugly places. Mountaintops above the tree line are ugly places. There's something eerie about them. If you've ever been out in Colorado and you've gotten up to the tree line, it just stops. It's just like a haircut. All got shaved off. There's something striking about the stone, the rock, the barrenness. Some might call it beautiful, but I think... I think a green mountain is much more beautiful than a rocky one. Abram, you might disagree, but there is something about it, but when you get up close to it, you're like, what are you walking through? You're just walking through a big gravel pit. It's not a pretty place. I'd much rather be walking through a forest. It's more beautiful. It's more lively. There's life there. There's no life where there's no beauty. And so if God's going to put all of this energy and all of this work into clothing the grass, making creation beautiful, he will clothe you. He will give you the things that you need. He'll give you the clothes that you need. And so you shouldn't worry about having these things. When your kids grow and you're like, man, we gotta buy another pair of shoes. Man, they run through their socks. Socks aren't made out of the same thing they used to be. It seems like every three weeks we're buying socks at our house. God will provide the socks for our kids or he'll provide warm weather so they can go barefoot.

And so we shouldn't worry and we shouldn't be anxious because creation testifies to us all around us that God provides for things much less valuable than us, much less important to him, things that are much more temporary. He provides for them. And so he will provide for us. So what is worry exactly? What does it mean to be anxious? I believe that worry is when you refuse to think about what's going on in light of what the Bible says. that worry and anxiety is a rejection of God's truth, that it has unbelief as its root. Some worriers would say, no, it's not an absence of thought. All I do is think about it. And I'd say, no, all you do is worry about it. And that's not the same thing as thinking. Martin Lloyd-Jones said this about the worrier. He says, the trouble with the person of little faith is that instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else. And as we put it,

He's going around in circles. That is the essence of worry. If you lie awake at night in bed for hours, I can tell you what you have been doing. You've been going around in circles. You just go over the same old miserable details about some person or something. That is not thought. That is the absence of thought. It is a failure to think. That means that something else is controlling your thought and governing it, and it leads to that wretched, unhappy state called worry. And so if you're a worrier or if you get worried or if you get anxious, you should immediately think, I'm not thinking clearly. I'm not seeing clearly. I'm not giving weight and consideration to the things that I'm worrying about. Because if I did, I would no longer have a reason to worry about them. And that's an easy thing for me to say and a very hard thing for us to do because I'm saying there's no reason for you to be afraid and worried about the things that you worry about. But we've grown so accustomed to it.

It's just become the place we go. As soon as we hear some new news, some new anything, some bit of information, it's like, oh, no. That's our first reaction. Oh, no. And so we worry. Jesus describes those who worry as having little faith. 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? Those of little faith don't think about their circumstances in light of God's provision. in light of his creation, in light of what he said. If he feeds the birds and clothes the fields, why then do you worry about what you'll eat or what you'll wear? I think worry is the sort of thing that we have to learn to recognize in our own lives. I think it's one of the things that we're so accustomed to that we don't even recognize it when it's happening. It's just become part of how we function. It's true that some people worry more than others, have a greater propensity to it, but there's not anyone in this room who has not worried.

Or been up half the night churning about something. I would not describe myself, I don't know if my wife would agree, but I think she would. I would not describe myself as naturally a worrier. Though there are times I get very wound up about stuff. And don't even feel like I can pray because it's like my brain can't get off the oh no thought. And you lose a night or two of sleep because of it. It's hard work to fight against worry and anxiety. It seems so natural. It seems as though there's no other response that you could have. And this is why we call it an indication of our love. It shows that we care when really it's an indication of our unbelief and our lack of faith. Here's a question about worry. Does it do any good? We can all kind of chuckle and say, no, it doesn't do us any good. It doesn't do anything for the situation or the circumstance we're worried about. We could fret and worry and be anxious and just...

have our whole lives revolve around this thing we're scared about, and it will not change the circumstance one bit, other than it will make us more unproductive and probably make the situation worse. Worry is paralyzing, and therefore it's destructive, because it keeps you from being able to take action or to think reasonably or rationally or logically about what should be done about this thing we're worrying. Sometimes worry is a good indicator that there's a problem coming. Then the question is, what will you do once you have a knowledge of what's coming? Will you do something about it? Will you ask God to do something about it? Or will you just sit there paralyzed, fretting about it? I think many times we worry because we don't know what we should do. But it doesn't bear any good fruit. Jesus asks us in the middle of this, and who of you by being worried can add a single hour to your life? In other words, when you worry, does it help? Some of you might not worry. Maybe when you get worried, you start crying.

I understand human emotions and I understand crying, but my question to you is, does your crying help? Some of you might not cry. Some of you might get angry when you get worried. You might pop off at the mouth or you might just be nasty to other people. And my question to you is, does your anger help? Of course, the answer to both of those questions is no. It doesn't help. It doesn't solve any of the problems. It doesn't make any, it's not a step towards a plan. It's just this going around in a circle, wasting time, wasting our lives. cultivating our unbelief. Worry makes us miserable. It takes the things that are going to happen many times. It takes what's going to happen in life and makes it scarier or worse to us. It robs us of the time, the precious time that we have to prepare for it, to prepare mentally, to prepare physically, to prepare emotionally, to prepare financially. It robs us of the time to prepare our hearts and minds to serve God when the difficulty comes.

I think worry and unbelief is really the result of us not being able to control our own lives. We get worried when we feel our hands coming off of the wheel. I can't keep hold of it. I can't steer it where I want it to go. And so I worry because my grip's going to fail. You are not in control of your own lives. You're not in control of the next breath that you're going to take or the next pump of your heart. God is in control of these things. He's given us life in the same way that he's given birds food and he's given fields beauty. Your life is not your own and you are not in control of it. And the more you try to keep control of it and you try to manage it and you try to keep everything right where it belongs, you will be more miserable and more worried and less faithful as a Christian because your faith is small. There are difficult things that will come into your life.

Sometimes they'll show up unannounced, and you won't know that it was coming. It'll just be, here it is, and you'll have to deal with it. Worrying about it will not help. Sometimes you'll have difficulty coming, and you'll see it coming. Someone's health will be deteriorating. The doctors won't have any more they can do. And you'll see what's coming. You'll see the sorrow and the grief on the horizon. Worrying in those situations is not going to grant you any more control. It's going to make you miserable. And it's going to draw your heart away from God. And so our job as Christians, our disposition toward these things, whenever worry or anxiety pops up in our minds, is to consider and to reconsider what God has said. If this passage is all you remember, then that's good enough. He feeds the birds and he closed the fields. I'm more valuable than both of those things. He will walk with me through this. I'm not alone.

God knows what we need. Our Heavenly Father knows what we need. Toward the end of this passage, Jesus compares Christians, which is who he's talking to, with Gentiles. He says Gentiles worry about these things, what they're going to eat, what they're going to wear. They're worried about the things of life that consumes them. But your God knows that both they and you need these things, and your Heavenly Father will provide for these things to you. So don't worry about them. What should you do instead? Well, from this passage, he tells us, seek first his kingdom and his righteousness. What's that mean? Well, in simple terms, if I was thinking how to translate that into something I would understand, what Jesus is saying is, your priorities as a Christian and the things that God's called you to do, don't change at all when something worrisome pops up. You should always be seeking his kingdom.

You should always be seeking his righteousness, which is obedience. You should always be doing the things that Christians are called to do. And when a worrisome thing pops up, your behavior and your priorities should not change. There will be many times in your life where you'll have something pop up that you want to get worried about, and you're going to feel as though it's just pulling you into this tunnel of chaos, this trouble, this problem. You have to find an answer. You have to figure out the solution. You have to bring... But really what you have to do is wait on God to do those things. There may be work for you to do. There may be steps that you should take. You know, if you live in Florida and the weatherman tells you there's a hurricane coming, you probably need to consider whether or not you're going to put wood up over the windows or whether you're going to evacuate. But you're going to have to live your life. You're going to have to continue to live. And so we ought to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, trusting that all of the things that we need

will be added to us because God knows that we need them. In whatever situation we find ourselves in, our goal should be to glorify God. We should ask, how would God have me respond right now? Living by faith, growing in our faith, as opposed to being those with little faith, means asking these questions. And it means trusting God when we don't know the answers exactly yet. Instead of trying to figure out how to control the situation, how to regain our sense of... Composure, we should say, okay, God's going to take care of that. I'm going to work to honor God and serve him. That's going to be my aim. And so I'm going to pray and ask God to help me, to provide, to care for me. That's what Philippians tells us to do. Be anxious for nothing, but rather through prayer and thanksgiving. Make your requests known to God. If you're a worrier, you should be a prayer. How do you fight worry? By praying a lot. As often as you worry, we should be praying.

The problem is the worrier will say the prayer doesn't work. And I'm afraid that's because their prayers are often an effort to control God. If I can't control it, then I'll pray to God and see if I can't get him to control it the way I want it to be controlled. That's not going to work. And so when the worrier prays, they ought not to pray and ask God to do what they want necessarily, but they ought to ask God to help them be content with what he does. I believe help my unbelief ought to be our prayer. The worrier should rest in God. They don't naturally do it. Martha couldn't bring herself to do it. You remember Martha, Mary and Martha? Jesus comes over and he eats and Mary's the carefree one who just doesn't care about anything. And everyone's like, oh, bad Mary. Mary's sitting at the feet of Jesus and Martha says, teacher, tell her to get up and help me. I've got all this work to do. And what does Jesus say to her? Martha, Martha, dear Martha, you worry about so many things, but your sister has chosen the better part.

She's chosen rest. There is a lot of work to do. I'll tell you, those of you who are younger than me, there will always be a lot of work to do. And you should always be doing it, but you'll never finish it. There'll be work after you die that somebody else will have to pick up and carry on with. The work will never, ever end. And so if you don't choose to have times of rest where you rest in God, you say, Lord, I've done my work and now I'm going to rest. It's not done. I'm still worried about it. You'll never find rest for your souls. Jesus says, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden. You'll find rest for your souls. Not because all of the tensions and difficulties of life are taken away, but because you've entrusted them to God to provide for. You've taken it off of your plate. He's taken it off of your plate. And probably the most difficult thing for a worrier to do is to trust God when the situation doesn't go the way they want.

Worriers tend to think that they're very smart people, that they have lots of experience, that they know how things should go. The problem with worriers, then, is when they interact with God, who's more powerful than them, who's smarter than them, who's wiser than them, who's more gracious than them, who's more patient, who's more of all the good stuff than they are, and without any of their corruptions, is that they find themselves fighting against an insurmountable opposition. all of their worrying is not going to persuade God to do something foolish or short-sighted. And I think worriers spend a lot of their life fighting and wrestling with God. What would be good is if their fighting and their wrestling would be to bring their own will into conformity to his instead of fighting with him to bring his will into conformity with theirs. And so worriers really do need to trust God because the worrier makes a habit of taking on the weight and the burden and the responsibility of things that they are not capable of carrying. Isn't that one of the most common times when you worry? You're like, there's something that needs to be done and I can't do it. I don't know how to do it. I don't have the time. I don't have the energy. I don't have the skills. I don't have the money. I don't have the strength, whatever. I don't have what I need. So I worry. But God's able to supply all that is necessary in every circumstance. And so those who worry or when you worry,

What should you do? Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness. How? Through prayer. Through choosing to rest. It sounds crazy to tell the person who can't fall asleep at night, you need to go to bed. But it is what we need. Because what happens if you don't sleep all night? Is the next day better? Is the next week better? No. It's just this terrible slide down into misery. And part of it is because you haven't slept in two or three days or a week. You choose to rest. If you ask God to help you to trust him and to grow your faith, realizing that when you ask that, it's going to be a painful thing when he answers it, yes, I will teach you to trust me. If you ask God to teach you to trust him, did I say that right? If you ask God to help you trust him, what will happen is he'll bring into your life circumstances where you have to trust him. There'll be circumstances where you're not inclined to trust him.

Where trusting him seems to be the most foolish thing in the world to you. You're like, any idiot would never be okay with this. This is how we learn to trust God. To be a worrier, you have to forget all of God's mercies to you. You have to act as though he has never done anything good for you, ever been kind to you, ever helped you in your moment of weakness, ever had a better plan than you for how to solve the problem you couldn't fix. But if you're a Christian, that's simply not the case. How many times has God resolved things that you had made a mess of and were continuing to make worse until God cleaned the mess up? And so a worrier ought not to forget all of God's mercies. They should make it their habit. If you're a worrier, you should make it your habit to remember and to say out loud to somebody else every day how God's provided for you and how he's been good to you and how he's protected you from your own self. Good, good discipline for you. Because he's been faithful to you in the past.

He'll be faithful to you now, and he'll be faithful to you in the future. And so Jesus ends by telling us, don't worry about tomorrow. Here's an interesting thing about us as men, as women. Even when life is good and stable and predictable, and we feel like we've got control, we still worry. What do we worry about then? We worry about the future. I've got control of things right now, but what if, fill in your what if. What if I lose my job? What if my car breaks down? What if I never get married? What if my kids walk away from the faith? What if I get cancer? What if? Fill it in. We need to be aware of the future. We need to prepare for the future. But we don't need to worry about the future. Not even tomorrow. Sometimes I tell people, I think I drive Eric nuts because he comes and asks me questions about next week before this week is over.

And I always say, Eric, I don't know. He says, are you coming into the office on Monday? He'll ask me on Sunday. Are you going to come to the office tomorrow? I don't know. And I think it drives you nuts. Because he's like, well, what are you doing? And I'm like, I'll work. I just don't know. I've got to get today finished. I've got to get today finished. I know tomorrow I'm going to work. I just haven't decided. I'll figure it out Sunday night. I can text you if you want me to. Like I can tell you, but I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I haven't sorted out all those details yet. I can't run at that pace. I don't know if that's a good thing about me or a weakness about me. But Eric laughs about it. Vanessa doesn't laugh about it. She does not appreciate it about me. Are we going to do this thing next week? The answer is always, I don't know. My kids ask me, hey, Dad, can we start? I don't know. There's a way of not preparing that's bad. And there's a way of trusting God.

that's good, and many times they look strikingly similar. And so the Lord helped us to sort those things out depending on how we're wired and what our temptations are. Nevertheless, Jesus tells us not to worry about for tomorrow, for tomorrow will care for itself. Now, how is it that tomorrow will care for itself? Well, the same way that every day that's come before tomorrow has been cared for, and that's by the hand of God, being merciful to his children. That's how it will be cared for. And all of the troubles of tomorrow, God will provide for. Each day has enough trouble of its own. And so we have no need of pulling tomorrow's trouble or next week's trouble or next year's trouble into today. We can't do anything about it. We can't change it. Can't avoid it, right? Going on a bear hunt, right? These are the stories we read in my house. Oh no, we found a snowstorm. Oh, can't go over it, can't go under it. Gonna have to go through it. That's right, that is life. Every single day of your life is that book.

You're going to come over the next, you know, the sun's going to come up and you're going to go, oh no, my car won't start. Oh no, the kid's puked all night. Oh no, can't go over it, can't go under it. You've got to go through it. Lord, give me the strength today to go through this in a way that honors and glorifies you. This should be our prayer every day. And you don't need to worry about like Wednesday yet because Monday will have enough trouble to fill up Monday's bin of trouble. I hope that those of you who are worriers, are helped I hope those of you who are married to worriers are helped to love people who worry you should know that whether you're a worrier or not you will have seasons where you will worry when I was reading commentary on this passage one of the things Calvin said was he says you know this tends to be a woman's sin and it's true I think it's true women tend to be more inclined to worry than men do

Which means that when the men start to worry, the women really get scared because that's not normal. Because normally the guy's like, yeah, it'll be okay. When he's not like, yeah, it'll be okay, they're like, oh, now we really have a problem. All of us are going to worry at some point or another. And all of us need to remember to entrust ourselves to God who provides for us and who cares for us and who walks with us and who doesn't abandon us. And we need to concern ourselves about today. You've probably heard the saying, control the controllables. What's the help? Control the controllables. What's it mean? It means there's lots of things you can't control. Work on the things you can control. Work on the places you can make progress. If there's something where you can't make any progress, don't worry about it. There's a lot of gospel in saying to somebody, don't worry about it. It's not usually something that people like to hear though. Timothy's going, no, I don't know how many times I've told him not to worry about it. God loves his children. He is our father and he will take care of you.

It will not always be easy and things will not always go the way you want. You can still love God and trust him and you can set aside your worry and your anxiety and really your goal should be to set it aside for today because tomorrow will have enough trouble of its own where you'll have new things to worry about, new things to trust God with. So do your work today as unto the Lord and trust him for tomorrow for the strength and the faith and the energy that you need for tomorrow's troubles and next week's troubles and next year's troubles. If not, you will be miserable. You will simply be miserable. And the worst part of it is you'll end up accusing God of not providing for you. That's probably the worst thing that's true about the worrier is they just say, God's abandoned me. But God hasn't abandoned them. They've wandered away from him. Their worry has carried them away into another world where God doesn't exist and they're not sovereign. And that's a scary place to be.

but it's not the place that we're in. And so we ought to trust God with the things we're worried about. Let's pray.