What keeps you up at night?
Not the thing you tell people. The thing that has you turning over at two in the morning. Is it your family? Your finances? Your future?
Here is the hard truth. Whatever you worry about most is probably where you trust God least.
If that is you, you are not alone. And this one is personal for me, because there is a correlation between responsibility and anxiety. The more you carry — leader, soldier, parent, provider — the more that weight shows up at night.
It did for me in grad school, when I was working full time and starting a family. Not one bad night. Not one bad week. Years of them. And it took a toll on my body. Ulcers in my mouth. Sleep that would not come. And eventually the first signs of a debilitating autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis.
You know what that news did? It made me more anxious.
I wish I had known then what I know now. Worry and anxiety do not solve your problems. They multiply them. And biblical faith does not silence the anxious heart. It speaks truth to it.
Therefore
Any time you hit the word therefore in Scripture, ask what it is there for. Right before this, Jesus said you cannot serve two masters — you cannot serve both God and money. And any time Jesus starts in on money, people get nervous.
So he immediately says it three times. Do not be anxious. Do not be anxious. Do not be anxious.
And understand who is listening. These are not people deciding between entrees or picking out a bottle of water that costs more than gasoline. These people are living on the edge of a desert. They know what it is when the water runs out. Food is not abundant. The clothes they own, they are wearing.
And Jesus says do not worry about food, drink, or clothing. What else is there to worry about?
But look at his logic. You call him your heavenly Father. He is the creator and sustainer of everything. You have trusted him with your eternity. And you will not trust him with tomorrow?
Look at the birds
They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
That is a lesser-to-greater argument. If your Father feeds birds, will he not feed his own children?
And if you ever wonder what you are worth, your worth is whatever somebody was willing to pay for you. God sent his Son to pay it all at a cross.
Then Jesus exposes the lie underneath the whole thing. Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?
Worry has never fixed a future. It has never healed a body. It has never added a single day. It feels productive and it produces nothing. Worry does not take away tomorrow's trouble. It takes away today's peace.
Notice how he finishes that thought, too. O you of little faith. Little. Not none. He is not saying you pagan, you doubter. He says the same words pulling Peter out of the water and waking up in the boat during the storm. He meets us where we are, and where most of us are is little.
Guests do not open the refrigerator
Here is the picture that helped me more than anything else this week.
Your kids walk up to the refrigerator in your house. What do they do? They open it. They help themselves. They announce that there is nothing in here, and then they find something anyway. They never once ask what it cost. They shut the door and go about their day.
Why? Because they know who you are. Mom and Dad handle it. That is what mom and dads do.
Now picture yourself as a guest in that same house. You would not open that refrigerator. You would certainly not help yourself. You do not want to be presumptuous. You are a guest.
That is it. That is the whole thing.
Worry is what happens when children of God start thinking like guests instead of sons and daughters. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
What faithfulness looks like right now
Then in verse 33 Jesus turns from stop to start. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Which sounds abstract until you make it a question. Write this one down.
What does faithfulness look like to my heavenly Father right now?
Two things in that question do the work. Faithfulness — because I am not called to be successful, only faithful. I am not called to control the outcome or leverage the misfortune into a better position. And right now — not the next five steps, not the five-year plan. This moment.
Think about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. A dictator builds a statue of himself eight stories tall and orders everybody to bow. They could have negotiated. Lord, we bow one time, we apologize afterward, and think of the platform we will have later to really honor you. They did not do that. They just stayed faithful, and they were not afraid, and they told the king so.
He threw them in the furnace. The men who threw them in died. They did not. And the king looked into the fire and said, did we not throw three men in? I see four, and one looks like the son of God.
Their faithfulness bent that king's knee to the one true God. Mother Teresa was right — we are not called to be successful, we are called to be faithful.
He can say it because he has been there
Jesus can command you not to worry because he faced the worst of it himself. In Gethsemane he sweat blood. He stared down suffering, abandonment, and the cross. And then he prayed, not my will but yours be done.
He trusted the Father perfectly, so that when your faith is little, his faithfulness carries you. Our hope is not in the strength of our faith. It is in the faithfulness of Christ.
Biblical faith does not silence the anxious heart. It speaks truth to it.
So the next time it is two in the morning: are you standing at that refrigerator like a guest, or like a child?
