One Way to Defeat Worry: Never Answer Your Critics

In his practical book, How to Win Over Worry, Pastor John Edmund Haggai, not to be confused with John Hagee, says that one way to defeat the power of worry over our lives is to develop poise in the face of criticism. I love what he writes here:

...follow the example of our Lord [Jesus], who answered His critics so often with silence. Our Lord defended other people. He defended the Word of God. He defended the work of His heavenly Father. He defended little children. Yet He never defended Himself.

Usually you will find it wise not to answer your critics, tempting though it may be to do so. "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him" (Proverbs 26:4).

Ask yourself what answering criticism will achieve. Your friends don't need an answer, because you retain their confidence. Instead, listen to the criticism objectively. Don't allow yourself to become emotionally involved. Sometimes you can profit from criticism. If the criticism is just, do something about it. If the criticism is unjust, ignore it.

On the other hand, if your enemies criticize you, so what? That's what enemies do. And remember that unjust criticism is often a backhanded compliment. It often indicates that you have excited the interest, jealousy, and envy of the critic. As the old adage goes, "No one ever kicks a dead dog."

Antidote to Worry

These brief thoughts presented by my colleague, Pastor Glen VanderKloot, from a John Ortberg book and the passage of Scripture that inspired them from Philippians 4:4-8, is worth the short time it will take you to read them.

We human beings can weave all sorts of horrible scenarios with the gift of imagination we have from God.

Or, we can focus on what is true and real and noble.

Doing the latter can make a huge difference in our lives and in the lives of those we touch every day.

By the way, if you haven't read the book from which Glen quotes, The Me I Want to Be by John Ortberg, I recommend it highly!

GAD or God?

That's the question that this devotional piece from Our Daily Bread asks today.

You might also be interested in this four-part sermon series on Overcoming Worry, which I shared with the people of my former congregation, Friendship Lutheran Church in Amelia, Ohio, in 2007:

Worry, the Static That Clings
Four Steps to Overcoming Worry
Affirmations, Action Steps from a Psalm
Worryblockers!

Worryblockers! (Overcoming Worry, Part 4)

[This message was shared with the people of Friendship Lutheran Church during worship this morning. Today was my last Sunday at Friendship. But if you live in or ever visit the Cincinnati area, this is a truly great church, filled with the love of Jesus Christ, with warm welcomes for all people, and a tremendous commitment to service in Jesus' Name!]

Matthew 6:25-34
Many of you know that I love Walt Disney World. I loved it long before anybody from my family started working there.

Like others, I enjoy Disney World in part, because it’s entertaining, clean, and sometimes even educational. But the biggest reason for my love of Disney World is that, to me, it’s an inspiring place!

We may never, like Walt Disney, build amusement parks or a media empire--how many of those does the world need anyway? But Disney World inspires me to consider what all of us could do with the gift of imagination that God has granted to us.

Human beings have the awesome capacity to imagine or envision the future. It’s one of the main things distinguishing us from all the other creatures God made. That ability has not only brought us Disney World, but also little things like democracy, the space program, and every technological innovation in history. I hope that this morning, you’re envisioning a bright and faithful future for Friendship, for example.

Sadly, we human beings are likelier to use the gift of imagination in negative ways, though. Sin soils our souls and with it, our imaginings grow dark. We’re accomplished at imagining how everything that can go wrong eventually will, often creating the very bad things we dread!

A young man was deeply in love with his new wife and she with him. But the young man was insecure. Because he couldn’t believe that anyone could be so stupid as to actually love him, he worried that his wife planned to leave him or that she was seeing someone else. He checked on her all the time and was in need of constant reassurance from her. Finally, she couldn’t take it any more. Although she’d never had any intention of leaving her husband or taking up with someone else, she did those very things. Afterward, oblivious to how his worried imaginings had contributed to this trainwreck, the young man felt a perverse sense of vindication. “I knew this would happen,” he said. Worry is negative imagining and it’s a killer.

In today’s Bible lesson, Jesus talks about worry. He notes that we tend to stew over our material well being. To that, Jesus says that life is more than food, clothing, or possessions. The things of this world fade away, rust out, or die. But God lasts forever. That’s why Jesus says we’re to seek God and the ways of God first and above all else. As we do, He says, we can trust that God will take care of our material needs.

Earlier this year, Friendship was faced with some daunting financial and spiritual realities. But the leadership of this congregation refused to yield to worry. Instead, they challenged us all to pray for Friendship, seeking God’s guidance; to maintain strong participation in the life of Friendship; to maintain strong giving, even to consider tithing, giving the first 10% of our income to the life and work of the church; and to invite others to worship.

Because you let God help you dare to imagine a different outcome and because thousands of other people joined us in prayer, Friendship is stronger than it’s ever been!

(And by the way, don’t stop now. Your commitment to those four priorities is more important today than it’s ever been. The salvation and well-being of thousands of your neighbors depends on your continuing to faithfully imagine a constantly strengthening and growing Friendship Church!)

As long as God allows this sin-drenched world to continue, providing His Church with time and opportunity to share the Good News of Jesus with others, bad things will happen to people, even to faithful people. But if we let Him, God will block worry from the lives of those who surrender to Jesus Christ and empower them to keep seeking His Kingdom.

In today’s Bible lesson, Jesus gives us some God-ordained worryblockers. These strategies will free us to imagine, work, and pray for God’s best, rather than worrying about the worst.

First: We need to live in what’s called “day-tight compartments.” At the end of today’s lesson, Jesus tells us, “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

It’s great for us to use our imaginations to dream, pray, and work toward good goals for ourselves, our church, and others. But Jesus knows that tomorrow morning, when you go to work or are hustling the kids off to school, you’ll have more than enough challenges on your plates; you don’t need to waste time stewing about everything that could go wrong the day after tomorrow, next week, or next year. We only can really deal with one day’s challenges--or more accurately, one moment's challenges--at a time.

Besides, when you borrow difficulties from tomorrow, which is what we do when we worry, you overlook the good things of today. Psalm 118:24 says, “This is the day that the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it.” We need to make a commitment to live in, savor, and enjoy this day that God has given to us!

I even encourage people to laugh more each day. It’s been shown that laughter is good for our bodies, opening up our blood vessels, making the jobs of our physical hearts easier.

Maybe that fact is behind the words from the Old Testament book of Proverbs, “A glad heart makes a cheerful countenance, but by sorrow of heart the spirit is broken...”

I love what C.S, Lewis said: “It is a Christian duty...for everyone to be as happy as they can.” No people have more reason to be happy than followers of Jesus Christ. Christ has killed off the power of sin and death over our lives and freed us to live boldly and happily with Him by our sides. We can live in day-tight compartments with assurance and confidence.

Second worry blocker: Seek out God’s will for your life! And for the lives of others. Jesus says that worrying about tomorrow won’t add a second to this life. (Nor, I would add, will it add any life to our living!) But when we seek God’s will, we gain access to what’s best in life. I believe that God strews markers along our ways through life in order to show us the way we should go.

Often, God does that through other people who, without our even knowing it, are acting as God’s cheerleaders for us. Years ago, for example, I read about a man who, as a boy, lived in poverty in a rough neighborhood. He was befriended by an elderly man who ran a drycleaning business. He often told this boy, whose life seemed to hold little promise, that he was a smart boy who would grow up to run a business of his own some day. In spite of his poverty and the fact that he came from a family of abusive alcoholics, that boy went to college and later became the chief financial officer of a multi-million-dollar organization.

You have the opportunity to be a part of such stories when you give to and volunteer for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Clermont County. Through Friendship's involvement in this organization, you have already given young people right here in our community the hope for a better future. I hope that you'll continue to work and pray for this important and worthy organization!

God envisions better lives for us than even we do. (That’s why I called my column here and named my blog site, Better Living.) So, we need to go to God for help in our daily living and decision making.

Third: We need to keep seeking God! Jesus says, “Strive [or, as we’ve traditionally heard it, Seek ye] first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

You’ve heard of heat-seeking missiles. Simply put, the guidance systems of these missiles seek out targets that emit infrared radiation. Focused on a specific target, thesy hit what they seek.

The God we meet in Jesus Christ knows the design of the human being better than anybody. He knows that you and I are desire-seeking missiles. We aim our souls at our obsessions. When, as Jesus speaks about in our lesson, we worry about things like money, food, and clothing, we may get them in overabundance. But in seeking out those targets, we crowd God from our lives. Seek to follow Christ and to live in His Kingdom above all else. God will take care our daily needs and empower us to help the poor and the hungry denied access to God's provision for them by the selfishness of the human race. But more than providing us with our daily bread, when we seek God, we’ll remain connected to God!

Seeking God first means not just regular prayer, Bible reading, weekly worship, and participation in service in Jesus’ Name, all of which are essential elements to being a Christian. I want to tell you today that it also means receiving the Sacrament of Holy Communion every time it’s offered.

The word Sacrament means mystery. In, with, and under the bread and wine of Holy Communion, Jesus’ body and blood mysteriosuly come to us. In ways none of us fully understand, Jesus Himself enters us. We gain a physical connection with God.

In Communion, we also enjoy a connection with every believer of every time and every place, including those already in eternity. When Jesus said that we’re to take the bread and the win in remembrance of Him, He didn’t mean that we’re to look back nostalgically to when He walked on the earth.

Anyone with even the faintest knowledge of Christian faith knows that following the God we know in Jesus Christ isn’t about looking backward. Religion looks backward, Biblical faith looks forward!

• The people of Israel got themselves in trouble and forgot God when, in the wilderness, they looked back nostalgically to their enslavement in Egypt.
• The wife of Abraham’s nephew Lot was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back to the city from which God was leading her.
• And when the angels appeared to the women at the empty tomb on the first Easter to announce that Jesus had risen from the dead, they said, “Tell Peter and the others to meet Jesus in Galilee, where He’s already gone ahead of them!”
  

No, that word remembrance that Jesus used at the first sharing of the Lord’s Supper was, in the original Greek, anamnesis, in my Caveman Greek, unamnesia, if you will. In Holy Communion, the walls between us and eternal timelessness with God and other believers are torn down. We are membered again, re-membered, re-connected to God and to all who have ever believed in the God we know in Jesus Christ.

In the fellowship of Holy Communion, we’re enfolded once again into the family of which we become a part when we believe and are baptized. Sins are forgiven. God’s love is seen and touched and tasted.

And something else happens. I once visited a shut-in who was dying. I gave Holy Communion to her. When we finished, I saw this woman beaming. She knew she would die soon. But in Holy Communion, God had given her a foretaste of the new and everlasting future that awaited her. God had given her a new vision. She could live or die today knowing that she was in God’s hands. She knew, as Jesus reminds us in today’s lesson, that she was of more value than all the birds and flowers of the fields. Christ had died and risen for her. (And for you!) By seeking God, worry was banished from her life.

God wants to block worry from our lives. Let that happen...

• by asking God to help you live in daytight compartments;
• by seeking God’s will for your life, including how you can help others overcome worry and see the possibilities in their own lives; and
• by continuing to seek God through prayer, Bible study, service in Jesus’ Name, weekly worship, and by receiving the body and blood of Jesus every time Holy Communion is offered.

Don’t worry about your life; let God give you his peace...always.

Affirmations, Action Steps from a Psalm (Overcoming Worry, Part 3)

[This is the third part in a series of messages shared during the worship celebrations of Friendship Lutheran Church, Amelia, Ohio.]

Psalm 145:13b-21
The story’s told of a man who went to see a psychiatrist for the first time. “Why are you here?” the doctor asked him. “For the past six months, I can’t seem to stop worrying,” he explained. “What’s been going on in your life?” the doctor wonderd. “I lost my old job, then started a new one and two weeks later, I got a new boss. My son is addicted to the Home Shopping Network and just ran up $15,000 of debt on my charge card. My daughter came home from school the other day, announcing that she had to write an essay on her greatest hero and asked me, “Who should I write about, Dad: Lindsay Lohan or Osama bin Laden?” The doctor listened to all of this and told the man that the explanation for his worrying was simple: He had a lot of worries!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about overcoming worry. We’ve said that to overcome worry, we need to place ourselves in the hands of God. Last week, we considered four steps for overcoming worry that came from Psalm 104.

But the fact is that worries do come our way in life. Today, I want to hold up four key affirmations and four accompanying action steps that we can use when faced with worrying times. They’re based on one section of Psalm 145.

Affirmation #1 is found in verse 13. “The Lord is faithful in all his words, and gracious in all his deeds.” When you and I face worrying times, it’s important to remember that God is faithful.

A number of years ago, Lutheran pastor Walt Kallestad told the story of Phoenix builder Gary Gietz. Gietz formed his own company, dreaming of providing customers with beautifully-crafted homes, reasonably priced and readied for occupancy in a timely manner. But fifteen years later, he had wandered far from his dreams. He excused shoddy business practices, telling himself that delays and poor workmanship afflicted the building business. His whole life was composed of worrying about and striving to keep subcontractors, vendors, and customers just happy enough to move onto the next job and stay in business. But then, Gietz decided to approach things differently. He asked himself a piercing question about his approach to business: What is it that God wants me to do?

That question, a prayer really, caused him to gather twenty-one key people at a local restaurant. They brainstormed together about “how it would be to have freedom from the tyranny of reneging on promises, the freedom to keep their word and be on time...” What Gietz and others are learning and teaching is that when we make our supreme concern not pleasing others and not merely getting by, but living and working for God, worries recede. Sometimes, we may become more successful when we do this, though we could be less so. There are no guarantees along those lines. But either way, we can rely on God because God is faithful.

And the action step that flows from that affirmation is simply this: When worries come, seek God. Lay your worries before God. God makes a way through and beyond our worries.

The next affirmation is drawn from the next verse of Psalm 145. “The Lord upholds all who are falling, and raises up all who are bowed down.” The affirmation here is: God raises those laid low by life!

When worries come our way, it’s easy to give in to despair. It’s even understandable. But it needn’t happen!

Corrie ten-Boom, a Dutch Christian who, along with her family, were imprisoned by the Nazis during World War 2, because they helped Jews escape their occupied country, is one of my heroes. At one point during her time in the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, Corrie was placed in solitary confinement. For four months. The cell was dark and there was dirty standing water on the floor. At times, she heard the cries of other prisoners and she knew that she too could be tortured by the Nazis. Once, terrified beyond all bearing, she cried out to God, “Lord, I’m not strong enough to endure this. I don’t have the faith.”

At that moment, Corrie looked down to see an ant. She noticed that the moment the ant felt water on the floor, it went straight back into its hole in the wall. Corrie realized that when the ant confronted something too big or overwhelming, it went to its hiding place. “Corrie,” God seemed to tell her, “don’t look at your weak faith...I am your hiding place, and you can come running to Me” the way that ant went to its hiding place.

It was then that Corrie remembered Jesus’ words, “Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” God raises those laid low by life. That’s the affirmation. And the action step that goes with it is this: Dare to hope. Dare to act on the belief that whether here or in eternity, God will lift you up and be with you always!

Our third affirmation comes from the next verse of Psalm 145: “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season.” Here’s the affirmation: God helps those who turn to Him.

This past week, I read the true story of Beth Slevcove. She made the decision not long ago to move into an inner-city area and found that she loved urban life. All except for one thing. The guys who owned the tattoo parlor across the street from her always “got into fights, harrassed women and intimidated men.” Beth looked at this and decided to do a very brave thing. She would get a tattoo at the parlor across the street. Now, that’s not the brave part. She told the guys who ran the place that she wanted, “Love thy neighbor” imprinted on her wrist. She told them that she was having trouble loving her neighbor because of all their fighting. One of the tattoo artists turned to his boss and said, “Manuel, dude, we’re scaring our neighbors. We got to stop fighting.” From that moment on, the fighting stopped and the sidewalk was safe. A few months after Beth got her tattoo, she ran into Manuel. He hugged her and told a nearby friend, “Here, this is my neighbor, the one I was telling you about.”

Beth Slevcove is a pastor who works with Youth Specialties. When she went to get that tattoo and to lovingly confront her neighbors for their bullying, she had no guarantees that things would turn out as they did. The God we know in Jesus Christ doesn’t promise us easy, propserous earthly lives. Just ask Christians who endure poverty, persecution, or other afflictions. But God does promise to help those who turn to Him and to be for them. That’s the affirmation in which Beth Slevcove obviously believed. And here’s the action step she exemplified: Dare to expect God to help you and be for you!

The next affirmation comes from the next verse: “You open Your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.” The affirmation is simple: God satisfies our desires.

Now, the moment I say that, an alarm bell ought to go off in our heads.

That's because when I consider my desires, I have to confess--one sinful human being to others, that some of the things I desire aren’t good. They’re things that don’t glorify God or that hurt my neighbor.

And some of the things I desire may be good, but just not good for me. For example, I may want to eat chocolate 24/7. But, even though chocolate isn’t a bad thing, it would be really bad for me to eat it all the time.

And, it seems that there are some desires I have that God just doesn’t want me to have. No matter how much I pray about it, for example, I’ll never be as handsome as Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, or Denzel Washington.

Those who follow Jesus are expected to channel their desires. That’s why Jesus tells us to pray, “Your will be done.” People who truly surrender to God find that their desires are, day by day, transformed. Our brains can get fogged in by a lot of selfish desires. I know that mine can be. But as we submit to God, we start to want what God wants for ourselves and for our world. Psalm 37:4 says, paraphrasing it just a bit, “[First,] Take delight in the Lord, and [then] he will give you the desires of your heart.” Put God first and God will give you the things you most need to be a fulfilled person of God.

Worries come to us all. But worry doesn’t need to have the final word over our lives.

• God is faithful; so, seek Him in prayer.
• God raises those laid low by life; so dare to hope in the God we know in Jesus Christ.
• God helps those who turn to Him; so expect God to help and to be for you.
• God satisfies our desires; so ask God to transform your desires to ones that please and honor God, help your neighbor, and bring you personal fulfillment.
  

Next week, the perfect ribbon for tying up our seventeen-plus years together: Four worry-blockers from Jesus, found in Matthew 6.

More Thoughts on Overcoming Worry

My colleague Glen VanderKloot sends out daily emailed inspirations to which I subscribe. Today's is a gem, fitting with my current message series, Overcoming Worry. (See here and here.)

From Glen:

A Thought for the Day

On a recent trip to the Grand Canyon, a troubled woman realized that there was something out there larger than her worries. She decided to toss her worries over the side of the canyon.

It's a big world out there - much larger than our worries. When we step out into the world, we can leave our worries behind, or at least see them in their true perspective.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Scripture
Matthew 6:25 TNIV

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 life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Prayer
Lord, help me trust rather than worry.
Amen

If you'd like to subscribe to Glen's daily inspirations, send an email to olwf1@gliq.net and put
SUBSCRIBE on the subject line. Glen is the pastor of Faith Lutheran Church in Springfield, Illinois.

Four Steps to Overcoming Worry (Overcoming Worry, Part 2)

[This message, the second part of the last series I'm presenting at Friendship Lutheran Church, Amelia, Ohio, was shared this morning during worship. On November 1, I'll begin my work as the pastor of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, Logan, Ohio.]

Psalm 104:24-35
Two weeks ago, we began this series on Overcoming Worry by saying that worry is like the static we hear on low-tech radios like the ones in my car. When I drive further away from transmitting radio stations, static takes over and I can’t hear them any more. Worry can do something similar, blocking out the assurance, love, and power for living that God wants to give all people through Jesus Christ. The number one foundational method for overcoming worry is to place our whole lives in the hands of the God we know through Jesus Christ.

But how do we do that? It isn’t easy.

Many times in my life I’ve told God, “Lord, I place this problem in Your hands. Your will be done.” But too often, usually within seconds, I find myself worrying about the very thing I just handed to God!

How can we let God take our worries from our shoulders and instead of taking them back, emerge with a positive plan of action for our lives? Our Bible lesson, taken from Psalm 104, gives us a good program, I think.

You should know though, that to take these steps for eradicating worry from your life, you’ll have to invest the most precious commodity you possess. Time. To overcome worry, we have to spend time with God.

I know how hard it is to set aside time for God. These past few weeks, as you can imagine, life in the Daniels household has been in overdrive. It’s been tempting to let my regular times with God slide. I’ve told myself more than once, “I don’t have the time today.”

But then, I remember listening to a radio personality interview a cardiologist. The cardiologist discussed how important it is to have a regular exercise regimen in order to fend off heart problems. The interviewer, who had suffered a heart attack a few months before, cut the doctor off to say, “I used to say that I just didn’t have the time to exercise. But after you’ve had a heart attack and find yourself flat on your back in a hospital bed, hooked to countless tubes and wires, you come to realize that you probably had the time for exercise all along and you resolve that if you ever get out of the hospital alive, you will exercise.”

The New Testament tells Christians, “Train yourself in godliness, for, while physical training is of some value, godliness is valuable in every way, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.”

To see an end to our worrying, we need to train ourselves in godliness by spending time with God. Psalm 104 gives us one plan for doing that.

Our passage begins with the psalmist marveling at the world God creates and renews. That's step one. Read that part of the lesson with me: “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great. There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.”

You’ve heard me before tell the story of the man who stood on a pier watching an ocean liner dock. A guy next to him said, “You know, nobody made that ocean liner.” “What did you say?” the first man asked incredulously. “Nobody made it. One day all the sheet metal, all the nuts and bolts, the engine, the steering mechanism, the rooms, the pools, the exercise facilities, everything just showed up on shore for Carnival Cruise Lines to use.”

Obviously, that man was wrong. Irrespective of the mechanism the creator uses to create, anything created requires a creator. And that includes this amazing uinverse!

Banishing worry from our lives can begin for us when we contemplate, as the psalmist did, that we belong to the same great God Who created the universe in which we live. The crucified and risen Jesus Christ, God reaching down to us in humility and love to make it possible for us to live with God forever, assures us of that! We belong to God.

Now, read the next section of the psalm with me: “These all look to you to give them their food in due season; when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.”

In our quiet times with God, the second thing we need to do is remember that God is still active in this world and still stoops to hear our prayers.

Millions of people have found this truth to be a great banisher of worry. Sir William Osler, father of modern medical science, once said that one way he overcame worry in his life was to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” In saying that prayer, taught by Jesus, Osler expressed faith that God would provide his needs that day, freeing him to focus on the tasks of the day, rather than stewing about them.

Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx and also a Christian, has a plaque in his office that says simply, “Wait to worry.” Good advice. After all, Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow, just ask the God Who cares for us to provide our needs today. Jesus also tells us, “Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.”

None of this means that God is a genie who will give us all we want. But it does mean that God is our compassionate maker, prepared to give us what we need and prepared to use those who are tuned into Him to be the conduits for His blessings to reach others. Someone may ask, "If that's true, then what about the starving people of the world?" The starving and others who suffer want of other sorts in our world neither disprove God's existence or His compassion. The existence of starving millions only prove that the haves aren't concerned enough to find ways to share what God has given to them with the have-nots. God is still active and still hears our prayers. He's still in the business of providing daily bread. To banish worry from our lives, we need to remember that.

In verse 33, the psalmist says, “I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.” This is the third thing the psalm reminds us to remember in our battle to overcome worry.

A national magazine once ran a profile of a young African-American growing up in inner-city Baltimore. Throughout his growing-up years, he swam against the stream. While he studied hard and got good grades, his classmates derided him for wasting his time and pressured him to join the gang, do dope, and enjoy some good times before dying young. But that young man was fortunate: He had a mother who worked two jobs, loved him and disciplined him, and pushed him to do well in school.

But she gave him something even more important than that. She prayed with him, read Scriptures with him, discussed the goodness of God with him, took him to worship and to Sunday School, and expected him to attend the Wednesday night services even when she was working. She wanted her son to know that if he remained connected to the God we meet in Jesus Christ, his life didn’t have to be the hopeless cesspool his friends thought it was. Time and again, that young man was tempted to chuck all the hard work, including the work involved in resisting temptation and remaining pure for God.

I'll never forget the climactic vignette in that article. The writer wondered, with everything seeming to work against him and the temptation to give up constantly dogging him, how did he maintain his focus? How did he remain tenacious in the pursuit of his dreams? How did he hold onto hope?

On a Wednesday night, the writer followed him to the Wednesday night prayer and worship service. He saw the young man stand with other members of the Church as they sang and prayed their praises to God and with hearty Amen's shouted their affirmations of the Pastor's message of hope from Christ!

In his times of temptation, that the young man took his gaze off of himself and his own circumstances. He turned instead, to look on God and to praise Him. When he lifted his praises to God, God lifted him up.

Here’s what I’ve learned in my own life. (Actually, it's what I'm learning in my life because I often wonder whether I'll have truly, definitively learned it before I die.) When my focus is on elevating myself, life pulls me down. I worry. I stew. I get nowhere fast. But when I shift my focus onto God, God lifts me up. He gives me the power to live and hope and thrive. To overcome worry, we need to take the time to praise God every single day.

The third step the psalm gives to us for overcoming worry is to spend time praising God!

Finally, the psalmist writes, “May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord.” Meditation isn't just for the adherents of religious systems.

The Bible says that believers in the God we know through Jesus Christ are supposed to be into meditation.

Pastor Robert Schuller says that a great way to picture Christian meditation is to imagine yourself riding in the backseat of an open convertible on a clear sunny day.

When Christians meditate, they turn their lives toward heaven. They let Jesus the Son shine on them. They let the Holy Spirit blow the breath of God into them.

In another psalm, Psalm 46, which inspired the lyrics of Martin Luther’s A Mighty Fortress is Our God, we’re told, “Be still and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth!”

In the first three steps I’ve discussed this morning, we tune into God. In the fourth step, meditation, we clear away the static and listen to God’s instructions.

We do that first, by reading a bit of Scripture and then by listening, not for an audible voice, but for that still small of voice of God telling us that in spite of all our worries, God is still there and still will give us strength. We let God show us how to apply His Word to our daily challenges and opportunities.

Years ago, as I was preparing a message on this very topic of worry, I was praying and decided to take a few moments to be still before God. I did something very hard for me: I shut up! I sensed God almost laughing at me. Here I was telling people to stop worrying and yet I spent hours each day worrying. I realized again that while my worries were too big for me, nothing is to hard or too big for God to handle. I felt as though God was inviting me again to hand my worries over to Him and get on with my life. As profound as that experience was though, if I don’t spend time with God each day, I start to forget how good God is and can only seem to remember how big my problems are. It’s so easy to fall back into the bad habit of worrying instead of living. Don’t let that happen to you!

This week, invest your time to let God erase worry’s power over your life:

• Remember that a powerful God made you and that through Jesus Christ, you belong to Him.
• Remember that God is still active in your world and will stoop to answer your prayers.
• Remember to praise God, focusing attention on Him and in the process, lifting yourself up too.
• Remember to meditate on God’s Word; God will assure you of your value and surely show you “a peace that passes all understanding.”

Next week: Four affirmations and four action steps for overcoming worry, all taken from another psalm, Psalm 145.