“Don’t Worry About A Thing” || Anxiety in Anxious Times || Week 1

Welcome to a brand new project for me! It’s been something I have thought about trying, but never quite knew when to get this going, but there ain’t no time like the present. I am doing at four-part sermon series that I am authoring myself. It’s been a goal of mine to try and write my own lessons/sermon series, but I never quite knew how. This is the time. I’m calling this series “Anxiety in Anxious Times”. With the state of the world being what it is, you could definitely say we’re in an anxious time. Whether or not that you deal with severe anxiety, it could be less anxious or more anxious. I myself have been diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder, so this time hasn’t been too kind to me. I want to write this series to try and not only talk about anxiety and how you can beat it but to show you through Scripture and personal testimony how God can be a huge part of the recovery process. I have looked up some key stories and key scriptures and will use them, with personal testimony, to show how Scripture has helped me and can help you beat anxiety. So you now have a summary/synopsis about what this series will be about and why I decided to write it. Sit tight over the next four weeks and enjoy the series.

Today’s lesson finds us in Matthew 6, where Jesus has been doing a lot of teaching to his disciples and to the Christian community. He talks about giving, prayer, fasting, and we enter today’s sermon about Jesus’ conversation of putting God’s Kingdom first. We are going to focus on the worry about time and what that means for us in a time like today. Today’s message is called: “Don’t Worry About a Thing”. Let’s dive into the first part of today’s Scripture. I will be reading out of the ERV Edition of the Bible.

Matthew 6:25-27 starts us at Jesus’ lesson about the Kingdom of God. It says, “So I tell you, don’t worry about the things you need to live – what you eat, drink, or wear. Life is more important than food, and the body is more important than what you put on it. Look at the birds. They don’t plant, harvest, or save food in barns, but your heavenly Father feeds them. Don’t you know you are worth much more than they are? You cannot add time to your life by worrying about that.” Jesus tells us not to worry about the things we need to live. We know that God is the ultimate provider and that putting our faith in Him and letting Him dictate the path for our life will lead us to the ultimate provision that He offers. We worry most times over the smallest things like Jesus’ mentions. We worry about what we want to eat, what we want to drink, or what we want to wear for a party, a date, to church, and more. Why though? Why is picking out food, drinks, and clothing such an intense decision for us that it takes multiple days to make the choice and a couple days of regretting the choice we made? I would say that getting these types of decisions is both a blessing and a curse. I mean, it takes my office anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to make both the decision of where to eat and what to eat. Do we need that long? We worry about where to go and what to eat but is it really that big of a worry. Some people don’t get to worry about these things. Their biggest worry most times is when am I going to eat my next meal, when can I get clean water, when can I get clean clothes. We take these decisions for granted most times and don’t even realize it. Jesus tells us not to worry about these things and focus on life and ourselves. He prioritizes these two things over food and what we put on it. Focusing on our bodies and ourselves is a priority we see publicized in today’s culture. I’ve seen some people praise it and some people demonize it. Really, taking care of ourselves in all areas: physical, mental, and spiritual should be done in a balanced effort by everyone. During this time of quarantine (as I’m writing this), I’ve been trying to make this more of a balance. I am trying to develop a routine to take care of myself physically on through multiple areas including regular basic hygiene, exercise, and eating right. I am also taking some mental health initiatives to better myself. This quarantine did a number to my mental health at the beginning, but once I was able to lock on to what was happening I was able to start bettering myself. Not only had the physical benefits kicked in, but I was working on personal projects (like this sermon series) and doing other fun things like doing puzzles, reading, catching up on video games, and more. To be able to take time and do things I WANT to do has been fulfilling, to say the least. The stressors of day-to-day life have gone down and the relaxation of daily triggers became more of a realistic scenario. I talk more on the spiritual side of things during the discussion of the next scripture, which is the end of Matthew 6.

We pick up at the end of Jesus’ instruction on putting God’s kingdom first. He continues in verses 28-33 to continue not to worry about the aforementioned stuff. The part that caught my attention is verse 34, but I will start at verse 33. It says “What you should want most is God’s kingdom and doing what he wants you to do. Then he will give you all these other things you need. So don’t worry about tomorrow. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Tomorrow will have its own worries.” I was only going to talk about verse 34, but verse 33 added something to this conversation about worry that I didn’t quite think about before. We need to only worry about wanting the best for God’s Kingdom and doing what God wants us to do, then everything else will be taken care of. That kind of adds an ease-of-mind mindset to things, doesn’t it? Just focus on the Kingdom of God and what God wants, and everything else will be taken care of. It’s adding devotion to God, which is more prayer, more time in the Word of God, more time listening to God…I think that’s a fair trade instead of worrying about food, drinks,, and clothes. Just an interesting insight…but onto verse 34. Each day has enough trouble of its own, so why worry about what tomorrow brings when we can barely hang on to what today brings. When I read this within the context of anxiety, this reminded me of someone saying, “Just worrying about it.” or, “Just stop stressing yourself.” You know what I mean? It’s one of those phrases that seem obvious from the outside perspective, but something that’s hard to accomplish when you suffer from it constantly. If we could only not worry about tomorrow and focus today. That sounds like a dream come to me. I “what if” things to death, so I not only worry about tomorrow, but I worry about next week, next month, and maybe even next week. How can one worry about just the stuff of today? I would explode if I just had to worry about today because I’m a planner, whether at the church doing Youth and Children’s Ministry stuff or my own life. I like to plan things out, which includes worrying about the future. How can one person worry about today?

This leads to my final point. Here’s how I think we can just worry about today today and not worry about tomorrow today (confusing sentence, I know, but stay with me). This time of quarantine has done one thing to me that I hadn’t done in a long time (probably 5-6 months), and that is to slow down. I’m always on the go, worrying about next week’s activities, next month’s events, behavior issues from previous weeks. My brain is always running with, “What do I need to do next?” During quarantine, after my bout of being sick, I trained my brain to focus on needed to be done today. Obviously, I couldn’t return back to work doing the full set of stuff, but there were things that still needed to be done. Taking it one day at a time, I was able to get back into the swing of things within a week. Slowing down has been proven successful for me, along with something else. I mentioned earlier that I would talk about how my spiritual side has been strengthened. Here it is. The other biggest thing that helped me focus on today is prayer. I’ll admit, my prayer life before the quarantine sucked. I felt that my prayers seemed meaningless and praying became less and less prominent in my life. I stepped away from our church’s Intercessory Prayer group with the intention of bettering my own prayer life first, then returning later. I mean, how can I pray for others when I barely prayed myself. So I did. I bought a book called “Dangerous Prayers” by Craig Groeschel. It opened my eyes to praying differently. To pray with more meaning, to pray more directly instead of generalizing it, and it helped. I’ve prayed almost every night and it helped me to take the focuses of today and put what happened today in God’s hands. I did this every night when I went to bed, and every morning I know up with a refreshed mind and a renewed focus on what that day will bring. Everything else kind of just falls into place.

I want to close this sermon with scripture from Ecclesiastes. I read this verse in prepping for a Sunday School and writing this sermon and saw the hyperlink between Solomon’s writing and what Jesus’ said. It comes from the end of Ecclesiastes 12, verses 13-14. It says: “Now, what should we learn from everything that is written in this book? The most important thing a person can do is to respect God and obey his commands because he knows about everything people do – even the secret things. He knows about all the good and all the bag, and he will judge people for everything they do.” Look back at the beginning of this scripture. Does that look familiar? There’s a connection here! We only need to worry about and learn to respect God and obey commands. Don’t worry about anything else. To combine all this is to say worry about respecting God and obeying His commands today. Done deal! Let us remember to keep our daily focus on respecting God and obeying His command. Keep your focus on today. Better yourself today. Talk to your loved one today. Follow that dream today. Worry about today! Let tomorrow worry about tomorrow!