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I've been building a garage in my backyard, so I ran electrical to the garage, and this last week here, I had my electrical inspection. The walls were already closed off and painted, and everything was done. And so I was sitting there, worried that this inspector would say something like, “I need you to rip open the walls for me.” Or, “Oh, you did this wrong, and you have to pull it all out,” or something like that. And so was I was stressed out waiting for this inspection. So honestly, I was ready to fight like, oh no, you have to do this, but you said I don't have to.
That's where my head was, just building up into this thing. And so, as so often happens when we're worried, what ended up happening to the electrical inspector, he came out, and we talked about his beehives for 10 minutes. Then he said, "Oh, you need to add this to the ends of these things, and you need to run a copper wire on the outside of your wall over to your heater. I was like, that's it. Okay, how often do we sit there and we're worrying, and we're worrying all of our energy going into the world is going to end, and then it turns out to be no big deal? Have you ever had a meeting where maybe your boss calls you and says, " Hey, tomorrow I need to speak with you in my office? And so you spend all that night, all your dreams at night, they're all about what you might say or what they might say and how you'll respond. Then, you're in the shower, and you're like formulating responses and all this kind of stuff, getting ready because, man, they're going to demote me, or they're going to yell at me, or they're going to do something, right?
And you walk into the office, and they're like, “Hey, can you help me add my Gmail account to my mail app?” Right? We worry so much; we destroy so much of our lives with worry. Did you know that research says that Canada is second place in the world for worrying behind the U.S.? We are the world's second most stressed-out worrying country, which makes no sense because what do we need to be stressed out for? There are people in the developing world it's like, “Oh man, I didn't work today. I guess we're not having our rice!” People are starving, and we're more stressed out than them. Barna Research recently released some results of some studies they did. They say 60% of adults worry or stress daily; that's adults. Now, if you look at our teens, how much are they stressing out? This world is broken, right? We can agree on that whether you're a follower of Jesus or not. When you look at this world, you're like, “There's some stuff out of place. There's some stuff that I don't like. This doesn't seem right,” and maybe we differ over what we think is right and what we believe is wrong, but fundamentally we know that things are not right in this world.
But because of that, what I've found is that we tend to default to worry over worship, tears over trust, and fear over faith. And you might be thinking to yourself, “Pastor Stephen, I don't need a message on worry. None of these examples that you gave me have anything to do with my life.” If that's you, wow. But honestly, most of us will deal with some worry or stress at some point in our lives, if not right now, right?
I need to clarify that we're not discussing anxiety today, okay? We tend to conflate the two. Don't we tend to say, “I'm so anxious about this,” or “I'm so anxious about that,” but what we really mean is that we're worried? Let's try to differentiate the two, at least how we will use them in this message series. Worry tends to be specific—“I am worried about this,” and where we feel worry is in our mind: we're thinking about it where obsessed with it, “Am I going to make my flight tomorrow?” That's worry. On the other hand, anxiety tends to be more general, and it's more felt in the body: “Travel makes my chest hurt.”
That general anxiety over travel, or when you're just in a room full of people and all of a sudden there's this weight, and your stomach is all wrapped up in knots, you're like, “I don't know what's going on, but I can't do this!” That's anxiety, and that will be what Pastor Ewen talks about on Thanksgiving weekend. But today, we're talking about worry. In our minds, we start to mull over something and all the possibilities and things that could go wrong when maybe none of it's actually in our control.
Today, I want to bring our attention to a book of the Bible called Matthew.
This is the recorded account of Jesus' life that one of his followers, Matthew, wrote. And so we have this firsthand account here, which we find in Matthew 6 24 to 25, and Jesus is teaching here, and this is what he teaches, “No one can serve two masters for you'll hate one and love the other. You'll be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money. That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life. Whether you have enough food and drink or enough clothes to wear, isn't life more than food and your body more than clothing?”
So, Jesus addresses the overall picture of what we tend to worry about. And he says, don't worry. And all of us go, “Right, I'm worrying about these things,” but what does Jesus say? He says, don't worry about money, don't worry about food. Don't worry about your health or your future. That's everything. That's all the stuff I worry about every day. That's the stuff that consumes my thoughts. That's the stuff that makes me exhausted. Aren't you the same? You have these things, and you're like, man, I wonder what I'm doing with the rest of my life, man, where's our country going in the future? How many of you have been worried about that lately? Man, my retirement was looking so good.
And now my stocks have tanked, and I will be working till I'm a hundred. We're worried.
Let's take a look at these. The first one is money. Jesus says you cannot serve God and money. He's not saying you can't have money if you serve God. He's saying, “Where is your focus?” What is important to you? Where do you place your trust? See, for some of us, if there's an issue, our default is that I need to find a way to get more money and listen. Sometimes, that's a good response. I can't pay my bills. So we either need to reduce our spending or raise our income. That's our two options. But how often do we jump into thinking, “Oh my goodness, I don't know that I'm going to make ends meet this month. I had to take a day off for sick leave, and I'm not getting paid for that. Now I'm going to be short, and everything's going wrong, and what am I supposed to do?” When does prayer come into it? Where does the trust come into it? Who do we focus on? Do you believe that if your finances were suffering while following Jesus's call on your life, would Jesus provide what you need?
Amen. Now, what you need, not necessarily what you want. Now he, he's a good father. He loves to give good gifts. That's scriptural. Jesus says the Father loves to give his children good gifts, but those good gifts need to be what's best. And sometimes, what's best is that we lean on him.
Interestingly, many of us sit there and say, “Yeah, can't serve God and money…. That’s good; now I need to focus on my investments. Let's go double down on work. I want to climb the career ladder. I want to be successful in my life. I want to be comfortable in my life.” But the audience that Jesus was speaking to here was hand-to-mouth. What I mean by that is a lot of these people, they were day labourers, and by day labourers, what I mean is they would stand around in the square, a lot of them and the rich people and the people with land and the people with work, they would come on by, and they'd be like, you and you, you're working today. And at the end of the day, they'd get just enough money to go out and buy some bread and feed their family. They got just enough to squeeze by. They were teetering on the end of destruction. And Jesus is like, don't worry about it. Doesn't that make it seem silly when we're like, man, I am so worried. What if I make the wrong decision about which one of these coats to buy? What if it only lasts one fashion season? These people are like a coat.
I'm not saying we ignore our finances, okay? I'm not saying that you go, “Good, I don't need to budget anymore. I don't need to pay my bills. I don't need to go to work. It's all going to work out. It's all going to be fine. Yeah, whatever. Throw money to the wind,” any of that. No, honestly, that's not wise stewardship. When we reach that place, we're running counter to what scripture says, that we are to be stewards of God's resources. God is saying here that we need not to be obsessed. We need not to be enslaved. We need to not put our fears over our faith that Jesus can provide what we need, right? Jesus says that is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life. Whether you have enough food and drink or enough clothes to wear, isn't life more than food and your body more than clothing?
Don't worry. Life is about more than these things. And so you see there, he talks about food. And again, like I said, many of these people he's speaking to are one mishap away from starvation. They're thinking to themselves, where's the food? And I understand there are people in North America today who are wondering, where's the meal coming from? But can we be honest with ourselves and understand that most North Americans and Western world people aren't thinking, where's the food coming from? They're thinking, what meals should I make or what restaurant should I eat at? In fact, for many of us and many pastors, the temptation when we're reading this passage and speaking to North American audiences is not, “Hey, you got to trust God with where your food's coming from.” It's addressing how I can eat less or be healthier. How can I not be a glutton?
We have so much excess, yet we still worry about it! Yesterday was Joshua's 15th birthday, so we were going to be just having a family party for him, and it was just going to be us, our immediate family, and he wanted some simple food. And so we were all prepped for that. And then, because of some family stuff that was going on with Embree’s family, her mom came into town and was going to be in Lethbridge. And so she's like, Hey, it's Joshua's birthday.
Why don't we take you guys out for dinner? So we're like, “Okay, there goes the plan.” Well, then we had a choice to make. See, Joshua got stuck between two options. Did he want to have Indian food at Rivaz, or did he want to go to the Japanese buffet? Let me tell you, there was some stress on his and my part because I didn't want fish! We were stressing out about food. It got to the point where he told our echo to flip a coin and assigned one to tails and one to heads. Fortunately, Indian won! Then, 10 minutes later, he decided to go with Japanese. I was stressing, but why? It all tastes good, some of it far better than others, but it all tastes good, right?
We're stressing out for no reason. We stress out about the craziest things; every time we stress or worry, it exhausts us. It takes energy away from us being able to think about things that honour and glorify God. It takes us away from being able to tackle the real issues that need to be dealt with in the day. Jesus also talked about our health, and that’s an important topic today, but can you imagine living at a time when their idea of medicine was like, oh, you're getting migraines? That's the evil spirits in your head that need to get out. So we're going to grab this auger, and we're going to drill some holes in your head to let the evil spirits out. That was Greek and Roman modern medicine. That's some good stuff right there. I had a headache. Now I have a whole skull ache. And the great thing about that kind of medicine, to be quite honest, is your patients never could complain. So listen, don't worry about your health. He's not saying don't take care of yourself, right? He's not saying do whatever you want and lay back, let your body deteriorate, and let everything fall apart because you're not doing what is good. But what he says is your body's temporary.
One of the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith is this understanding that we are spiritual beings. Now, I don't want to create a false dichotomy here. Our body and our soul are deeply and intricately connected. However, there is the essence of us that goes beyond this physical world. And so we can obsess about taking care of our body, and we can be like Elon Musk and think to ourselves, man, I just got to create a robot brain so that one day we'll be able to transfer my conscience, whatever. We can be some kind of person who wants to cheat death, but at the end of the day, should our focus be on beating or cheating death or should it just be on focusing on what lasts on the eternity that awaits us on the mission that Jesus has given us, that impacts and affects the eternity, the existence of the people around us to be selfless rather than self-centred. Don't worry about your health. Be wise, but don't worry about it.
Jesus, just before this had said, “Don't store up treasures here on earth where moths eat them in rust destroys them. And where thieves break in and steal, store your treasures in heaven where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal.” Here's the thing about your health. You can do everything right, and then your genetics get you. You can follow everything modern medicine tells you is correct, and then you'll develop cancer. And it turns out that what they told you was right is the thing that was full of carcinogens that got you. I'm not wrong. We don't like to think about this stuff, but that's the thing, right? This natural world, we can focus on it, we can stress about it, and it can all turn out exactly how we hope it wouldn’t! So why do we worry about it?
Jesus also said, don't worry about your clothing. Now, here's another interesting one. Jesus is actually talking to people, not those who are like, “Oh, let me go through my closet. I got to figure out what I'm going to wear.” He was talking to people for whom clothing was actually a matter of exposure. “Am I walking outside in my underwear today? The night is cold. Am I going to be warm enough today?” That was what he was dealing with. What do most of us worry about when it comes to clothing? Does this match that? Is this in season? Is this in style? Oh my goodness, these shoes, they're not perfectly comfortable or Oh, goodness gracious. Look, I need more money. I got to rebuy my entire wardrobe. It's out of season. Oh, white pants, after, before Labor Day. That's what I mean, right? We fill things. Do you button the middle suit coat button? Do you button the top one? All of them, none of them. What do you do? Pleats? No pleats. Do you get little sock suspenders? (Hey, don't discount them until you tried them. They're great. There's nothing like it when you're wearing a suit!) We sit there, and we worry about all this stuff,
All of it. But for us, so often, it's a matter of others' opinions of us. You know what that's called? That's called pride.
It is.
We stress out because we can't deal with the thought that somebody wouldn't think about us as we want them to. We look at fashion, not function. For some of us, if we swapped the time we spent thinking about what we would wear that morning with time spent with God, I genuinely believe it would change our lives.
Jesus also says, don't worry about the future. Why are you dealing with things that haven’t even happened yet today? Jesus says it this way, “So don't worry about tomorrow. For tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today's trouble is enough for today.” Yet, how many of you actually worry about today versus tomorrow? The majority of the stuff that sits there buzzing around in my brain isn't right now in this moment; it’s stuff like, “Man, I still have another inspection I have to go through. What's going to happen there? Oh man, I haven't even scheduled it yet!”
Tomorrow's problem. Don't worry about what may happen in the future. It may happen, but Jesus helps us move beyond worry towards trusting him. Jesus says, “Look at the birds. They don't plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your Heavenly Father feeds them. And aren't you far more valuable to him than they are?” God loves you. He cares about you. And the great thing is that no matter what happens in this physical world, if we get called from this place, that's great, right? No more worry. Now, in this, God loves the birds. He cares for the birds. But when a bird gets up in the morning, it doesn't sit in its nest and go, where's my food? Right? It doesn't wait for a worm to drop out of the sky unless it's a baby bird.
It gets up, and it goes, and it finds some food. It doesn't just sit and starve and go, okay, God. There is a difference between concern and worry. Concern looks at a hurdle that must be overcome and seeks to surmount it. Worry looks at things beyond your control that may not even happen. And more often than not, as you worry about that thing because there's nothing you can do about it, it paralyzes you. So the concern is like, I should do something. There's a real thing I need to deal with. Worry is, oh my goodness, Jesus says, can all your worries add a single moment to your life? Modern science says it steals time from our lives. Stress is a killer. But do you and I trust God? See where you worry most may be, where you trust God the least. What stresses you out the most may be where you are not giving into God's hands and saying, you know what? Whatever you want to happen in this situation, I know you love me. I know you've got a plan for me. This is yours.
Jesus continues. And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that they are here today and thrown into the fire that is here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith? So don't worry about these things saying, what will we eat or what will we drink or what will we wear? These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows your needs. Seek the kingdom of God above all else and live righteously; he will give you everything you need. Is God really first? Seek the kingdom of God above all else. Many of us know this passage as seek you first, the kingdom of God. Are you seeking it first? Why do we worry? I've pointed out a little bit before. Have you ever noticed that most of what we worry about doesn't happen? And when it does, it's generally not so bad, like taking my kids to get a shot or something like that, right? You're sitting there squeezing them, they're yelling, they're screaming, they're squirming, they're freaking out, and then they get the shot, and they're still squirming and screaming and freaking out, and you're like, we're done, right? Oh,
Parents, you've been there when the worst happens. Here's the thing: sometimes it does, but when the worst happens, you're not alone. And because of Christ, we can reframe our perspective on life to understand that at this moment, our very existence, the entirety of our time on earth, is one single dot from a ballpoint pin on an eternal line infinity; that's spiritual existence. And this life here, while it significantly impacts how we spend that eternity and how others do, is but a prick in that infinite scope. And yet, how many of us spend more time thinking about that eternity than we do the moment that is but a fraction of that? Imagine how different your life would be if, instead of worrying about today, tomorrow, or all the things to come, you gave your worries to God and trusted him. Imagine how different your life would be if you didn't think to yourself, God's a big meanie, and if I trust him in this, he will take it all away from me. And so I need to onto it all forever. And we just said, God, what's best?
It could result in more blessings. Perhaps it results in eternal blessings. But imagine how much freer we could live. Imagine the difference in our interaction with people around the world. If all of a sudden they looked at us and they said, why aren't you worried about the global whatever? Why aren't you concerned about who's in office? Why aren't you concerned about the impending global doom crash of all financial things in the world? Why aren't you worried? And you could say, because I know, my God, he's got me. So today, I want to encourage you to bring your biggest worry to God and focus on faith, not fear, because Jesus has already surmounted the impossible.
Humanity had rejected God. We've thrown him to the side. He created us, and we went, “Nope.” And it was entirely within God's purview to start over. But he said I love you. I care about you, and I'm going to do what seems impossible, what is impossible for each of us. And I'm going to come to earth and live amongst you. I'm going to accrue credit for the debt of all humanity. I will die on that cross, even though I don't deserve it, and I will overcome the grave. Then, he reaches out his hand with those holes and scars and says, come to me. Come to me. Let me give you life to the fullest.