Most Comforting Lord, You encourage me not to worry. You did that because worry causes me to … damage my health … allows the thing I am worried about to consume my thinking … has an effect on the way I treat others … and limits my ability to trust You. You are the same God who gave me life so why do I struggle with trusting You with the details of it. There is another word that often gets used in place of worry … concern. The difference is that worries immobilize me while concerns move me to act. Worry is more harmful than helpful and distorts the fact that You never ignore me when I need Your help. When I worry it shows in lack of faith and not understanding who You are. There are challenges You want me to pursue and worrying keeps me from doing them. Your Word tells me that worry steals my thoughts, energies and paralyzes me. Fear is a running mate of worry and stymies my efforts to be more like You.
Living one day at a time keeps me from being consumed with worry. Time spent planning for tomorrow is well spent … worrying about tomorrow is wasted time. Sometimes it may be hard to tell the difference between the two but careful planning is thinking ahead to achieve goals, taking steps to move my life forward and trusting that You have me in Your sight. When done well, planning alleviates worry. Worrying, by contrast, consumes me with fear and becomes a barrier to my trusting You. When I worry, I allow it to interfere with my relationship with You. To allow worry to overwhelm my thoughts leads me to doubting whether I can trust You to meet my needs and help me through my difficult times. As You tell me in Your Word, “Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough troubles of its own.”
Rather than dwell on things to worry about, You encourage me to seek Your Kingdom and all the things I worry about will be dealt with in due time. To this end, I must turn to You with my needs, seek Your help in resolving them, fill my mind with Your desire for a better life for me, and use Your example as a pattern for my life. To serve You and obey You must become a priority for my life. People, things and selfish desires all compete for priority in my life. Any of them can quickly bump You out of first in the things I hold dear. The unsaved worry about such things as what they will eat, where they will live, what others will think of them, but in Your faithfulness I know I can count on You to care for all of my needs. That is why going forward, I will reject worry and trust that You have everything in my life under control. And it’s in Jesus’ name I pray. AMEN!!
Matthew 6:25 Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not your life more important (to God) than food and the body more important than clothes?