"Do not worry"

[This was shared at a marriage ceremony officiated on June 6. The Bible text was chosen by the bride.]

Matthew 6:25-34

"Do not worry." 

Along with, “Do not be afraid,” this seems to be one of the most common admonitions in the Bible. 

In one way or the other, God is telling people don’t worry, don’t be afraid for tomorrow, all the time, it seems.

So, why does God keep repeating Himself? 

Because, it seems, worry and fear are endemic to the human condition.

In fact, worry and fear aren’t altogether unwarranted. 

One reason for that: There are so many things that can and do go wrong in the world.

Another reason for fear and worry though, is that we’ve inherited this condition from Adam and Eve called sin. And sin’s basic impulse is identified all the way back in the Bible’s first book, Genesis. Adam and Eve ate the fruit that God told them not to eat because they wanted to “be like God.” 

At root, every one of us is a control freak. We want things to go our way. We want them to go the way we think is right. We worry when we think they mightn’t go the ways we want to them to go.
So Jesus says, “Do not worry.” 

But He doesn’t leave it there. Jesus isn’t telling us, like an old song, “Don’t worry. Be happy.”

Instead, Jesus gives us a reason for not worrying: God has everything under control. Even when things seem out of hand. God is still in control. 

And God knows our every need and will provide for every need, even our need to forgive each other, to love each other, to work together to build a common life rooted in Christ, and to buck each other up with hope of eternity and with the certainty that our lives have value because Christ, God in the flesh, died and rose for us; that He is with us always, even in the most difficult places; and that He has created marriage to be a haven and a community of peace, of shalom, for a man and a woman, giving them a taste of that perfect peace and community that Christ will give His people in eternity.

So, Chris and Christina, know today that if you build your life on the God Who revealed Himself to Israel and, fully and definitively, in Jesus Christ, adversities will come. Tough decisions will need to be made. After all, this isn’t heaven. 

But when you build on Christ, you needn’t worry. 

God has things in hand. 

He will hold you in His hand. 

And, as you both commit yourselves to Christ and one another, He will renew the joy you have in each other again and again. 

Don't worry; trust in Christ. Amen 

First and Last Pictures of Lincoln's Presidency and Thoughts on Worry

The first & last portrait photos of Lincoln as President: May 1860 & Feb 1865. pic.twitter.com/BmTmanTNPL
— ClassicPics (@History_Pics) November 20, 2014

The toll of his worry and care can clearly be observed by comparing these two pictures, one taken at the beginning of Abraham Lincoln's presidency, the other taken just two months before his assassination.

Worry and care do the same thing to all of us, which is why Jesus told us not to worry.

He undoubtedly told us this because to not worry is so foreign to human nature. We needed to be warned against it.

Worry is uniquely human. Creatures capable of anticipating the future, we use that capability in a way that expresses the fundamental sinful impulse of wanting to "be like God," to call the shots and control the future.

How many of the things that we want to control, are we able to control?

And more importantly, how many of those things should we control?

In the book, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has his fictional senior tempter talk about different kinds of "time": the past, the present, the future, and eternity. (And how hell tries to leverage our confusion about these modes of "time" to destroy our having relationships with God.)

For we human beings, the past is done, something over which we have no control. We can repent for the sins of our past. But to spend time ruing that past, is a waste of energy for something that cannot be changed. If the devil cannot tempt us to new sin or away from repentance and God's forgiveness for past sins, he loves to weigh us down with shame or regret, not just for sins, but innocent actions of our past.

The future is as insusceptible to our control to the past. We can make plans. Some may even succeed. But we have no guarantees that they will be fulfilled or be fulfilled as we want. This world is imperfect. We are imperfect. Our plans are imperfect. And the follower of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, is called to believe that God is in the final control of everything, despite our plans.

Both past and future are unreal. The past no longer exists. The future has yet to exist.

Yet, people often spend more time in these two unreal places, ruing and worrying, than they do in the two places that are real, where things can be changed.

Those two places are, first of all, the present, when we can decide what actions we will undertake, what thoughts we will think, what words we will say.

And the second is eternity, the place where God always dwells in what Lewis in another of his books, Mere Christianity, describes as "the eternal now." By His resurrection, Christ has secured a place for all who turn from sin and believe in Him, in that certain eternity.

Focusing on those two real places--the present and eternity--will mitigate our worry.

Focusing on what we can and should do in the present empowers us for living fully in the unfolding moments of our earthly lives.

Focusing on eternity assures us that even if we mess up, as we inevitably to, even when this world does its worst to us, those who trust in Christ, have a connection to a loving, sustaining God and to a perfect kingdom in which our tears will be dried and we will live in eternal certainty.

This is a Tough Message

But it's also life-giving: He is rich who is satisfied with what he has.

Good Advice

• Always pray before planning.
• Always love people more than things.
• Do all things to please God.

See here.

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.

Goal-Setting, A Christian Approach, Part 2

Yesterday, I noted successful people driven by the self-aggrandizing notions that inform the average self-help book or seminar, are unhappy, unfulfilled people. They’re typified by the extremely wealthy man who’d captured every dream he’d ever had who I overheard at a recent political fund-raiser. “How are you doing?” he was asked. “Oh, alright,” he said, “But really, nothing really changes in life. It’s just the same old boring stuff all the time.”

Here was a man who had achieved his goals in life. But because all his pursuits had been propelled by the desire to please self, he was supremely unhappy.

At the conclusion of yesterday’s installment, I wrote:

...the first thing we need to get straight when it comes to establishing goals for ourselves is what our ultimate desires are to be and from what sources we ultimately are going to derive meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.

Let me introduce you to someone who may or may not be a “success” by the world’s usual measurements, but who epitomizes success from a different perspective.

When I was a young guy in my twenties, I came to know a man named Charlie. Charlie was in his seventies back then, a semi-retired housepainter who for a time, still occasionally took on a job here and there.

Charlie’s wife suffered from a disease that ultimately rendered her bed-ridden, utterly dependent on Charlie and the family and friends he recruited to help him for a few sparse hours each week. Until his wife was very ill, Charlie was always in Sunday worship. It was one of the few times in any given week that he left his wife alone.

I saw Charlie sad at times. There was no denying the pain he underwent watching the love of his life suffer and die. Nor did he deny his grief when she died. But I never heard him complain of his lot in life, never heard him rue the hours spent caring for her.

In fact, if there is one word I would use to describe Charlie, it would be grateful. He seemed filled with a constant gratitude.

This impression was only strengthened by something he told me and another twenty-something guy from our church on the day of his wife’s funeral. The service had taken place, as had the committal and the luncheon in the church’s basement fellowship hall. Charlie was up in the sanctuary, making decisions about what to do with the flowers that had been sent in honor of his wife and we had gone to check on him.

Charlie seemed to sense that this was a teachable moment for two young bucks, each of us then married just a few short years.

“Whitey and Mark,” he said, “I’m so thankful to God today. God has always been good to me. He gave me a wonderful wife to share my life with all these years. And of course, because of Jesus, He’s given me the hope that I’ll see her again some day. Only when I do, she’ll be healthy again. I am very blessed!”

But what about all the “lost” years when he could have been doing something else?

If either of us had asked Charlie that question, he would have looked at us as though we were deranged...and for good reason.

Charlie was someone who had his priorities straight. Jesus says that the highest pursuits any of us have in this life are to love God and to love our neighbor, including the neighbors who live under our roofs. Everything else must take second place to that. [Matthew 22:34-40] Charlie believed that was true.

He obviously felt that it was important for all of us to love sacrificially, not to earn spiritual merit badges and not out of grim obligation, but because, through Jesus, Who died on a cross for us, we have been loved sacrificially by God. Sacrificial love is our sensible, appropriate, and difficult response to the God Who has loved us sacrificially, the God Who assures us that even if we lose our earthly lives in the giving of love, we still will have eternity with Him.

The New Testament book of Romans says:

“...while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly [that’s all of us who live with unforgiven sin]. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person...But God proves His love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us...” [Romans 5:6-8]

And a man named John, often called the apostle of love, puts it succinctly:

“In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another...” [First John 4:10-11]

The self-help books tell us to dig into ourselves, get a fix on our gifts and passions, and to adopt a life plan and subordinate goals based on that internal inventory.

The Bible commends a different way of going about our living, the way that Charlie adopted. It begins with gratitude for the love God has given to us through Christ and it makes the pursuit of God and His righteousness our number one priority. In setting our goals, we would do well to remember Jesus’ words:

‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

‘So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today. ' [Matthew 6:25-34]

[Next installment: God and your future]