Overcoming Your Worries?

Matthew 6:25-34

Matthew 6:25-34, “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? 28 “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; 29 and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first the kingdom of

God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added

to you. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

Matthew 6:19-24 luxuries

Matthew 6:25-34 necessities. False religion motive is money. So, in our text in Matthew 6:19-24 we have three alternatives.

• Two treasuries.
• Two visions.
• Two masters. 1. Where is your heart? 2. Where is your focus? 3. Who are you serving?

Story of a man who could not sleep because thinking someone is under his bed. Planning for tomorrow is time well spent. Worrying about tomorrow is time wasted. Don’t worry. That is the heart and the soul of the passage. Worry 5 times

V 25, V 27, V 28, V 31, V 34, The Lord is calling for us to cease from worrying. Now, I guess all of us must admit that worry is a part of life. It’s a pastime for most people. Worry is the equivalent of saying, “God, I know You mean well by what You say, but I am just not sure You can pull it off.”

Worry is the sin of distrusting the promise and the providence of God, and yet we do it all the time. Worry is interest paid on trouble before it’s due. Worry is faith in the negative, trust in the unpleasant, assurance of disaster, and belief in defeat.

Worry is wasting today’s time to clutter up tomorrow’s opportunities with yesterday’s troubles. Demonstration of Fog in a glass of water. One glass of water divided into 60,000 million drops can cover the whole London.

Put it all together and you don’t have much more than a glass of water, but you can sure mess up a whole lot of people. Worry is the expression of human sinfulness. We don’t worry any more about the basics of life, and so we are little different than the people to whom Jesus spoke.

Because they worried about in verse 25 about eating, drinking, and wearing clothes. They were worried about the basic stuff. They were worrying about my next meal, a glass of water, and something to wear. But for the Christian, that is forbidden.

For the Christian, that is sinful. For the Christian, that is foolish. There’s no place for us to worry, even about those basic commodities of life.

Why? Because the Lord says, “That’s My area.” If you listen to Jesus all through the sermon on the mount, and all through the gospels, and if you listen to the epistles, which are the commentary on the gospels, one thing you learn is that God does not want His children preoccupied with the mundane passing things of the earth.

• God wants us to set our affection not on things on the earth, but on things above.
• God wants us to lay up our treasure in heaven.
• God wants us to seek first the kingdom of God.

In order to free us to do that God says, “Don’t worry about the other stuff. I will take care of that.”

How foolish to be worried about material things? But that is precisely what people worry about. Now Jesus could be talking about rich people here, the same people who have all the luxuries in Verses 19 to 24 are also worried about the necessities here in Verses 25 to 34.

Because rich people worry about necessities, that’s why they stockpile all their money, so they can hedge against the future. They will make sure that if everything goes apart, they are going to be able to have it all. So rich people worry about necessity.

So do poor people. Poor people maybe worry about it in a little different way. They worry about it but can’t do anything specific to relieve that worry. Rich people can at least stockpile.

Poor people can worry about it and can’t do a thing to alleviate that. So, the Lord is here, maybe primarily directing it to poor people, but it must encompass the rich because anybody can worry about having the necessities of life.

Why, there are people in our own society who have all they need, and they are worried about running out?

Remember what happened when the lockdown announced?

Remember when there was a shortage of fuel?

Why poor people should worry? How do they know where their next meal is going to come from? How do they know they are going to have shelter and clothes? Our Lord precisely says you are not to worry about that. You are not to take your luxuries and in some hoarding fashion as a hedge against the future and not use what you have been given by God to accomplish His purposes now.

The Lord is covering luxury in 19 to 24 and necessity in 25 to 31.

Throughout the sermon on the mount the Lord is laying a standard that was uncommon in His day and it was far beyond anything that was going on in the religion of Judaism. He gave them a new standard - not a new one, but a reiteration of the old one, the divine one. He gave them the divine standard of God’s law. He gave them the divine standard of moral issues, the divine standard of religious worship.

Here He gives them what God says about their money and their possessions. God has something to say about your attitudes, something about your commitment to the Word of God, something about your religious activity, something about your moral values, something about your money, something about your possessions, something about your prayer life.

Jesus sweeps through all these dimensions of life in this great sermon.

Matthew 6:25-34 on the necessities. Somebody might answer this way. I read verses ¹⁹ to ²⁴ and it said, ‘Don’t lay up for yourselves treasures on earth but in heaven. Don’t serve money, serve God.’

But what about the future? In this kind of changing world if I don’t store lot of it away how do I know I am going to have food and drink in the future? How do I know I am going to have clothes for myself and my family? How do I know I am going to have a shelter?

I believe in wise planning. But if you are having trouble with that, the Lord says, “Don’t worry about that.”

• It’s fine to save for the future.
• It’s fine to plan for the future.
• It’s wrong to worry about those plans because God will take care of that.

If you have a choice between God saying to you, “Use this money now for this purpose,” and your own feeling, “I would better have it for the future because it’s unknown,” then to keep it for the future is to disobey the moment.

Now these are general principles that you are going to have to apply. So, we may have treasure. We are to lay it up in heaven and we’re free to do that when we don’t worry about the necessities of life.

V 25, “Therefore,” Is to take us backwards. He gave us three principles in verses 19 to 24. 1. Earthly treasures corrupt.

2. Yearning for earthly treasures blinds your spiritual

vision. 3. You must make a choice between God and money. Therefore, don’t worry about those kinds of things. Earthly things should not be your preoccupation, even the basics of life. Can we not at least worry about the basics, if not the luxuries?

No. Not at all. If you are a child of God, you have a single goal:

• Treasure in heaven. Your heart is on heaven.
• You have a single vision. You see God’s purposes.
• You have a single Master. You serve God, not money.

Therefore, you cannot become preoccupied with the mundane things of this world.

What Jesus is specifically referring to? V 25, “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?

• Food,
• Water,
• Clothes.

We don’t worry about that. There is a supermarket on every corner, and you can go and pile it all in. We have got so much water in our house we never think about it. In Jerusalem at Jesus’ time when the snows didn’t come to the mountains the streams dry up and there was no water. There were times when the crops didn’t come through because the locusts plagued the crops. When the crops didn't come through, there wasn’t any food and there was famine in the land.

When there was famine in the land, there was also no income in the land. When there was no income in the land, there could be no purchase of clothing in the land.

These words of our Lord are literally tremendous and powerful spoken in the context of that time.

• Don’t you ever bother to worry about what you are going to eat.
• Don’t you bother to worry about what you are going to drink.
• Don’t give a second thought to what you are going to wear.

These words to those people on the edge of the parched desert, who were totally dependent upon the natural resources must have been a shocking statement. Our Lord recognizes that man in his covetousness tends to devote his whole life to caring for the externals. He tends to devote his whole life to his food, his house, his clothes, and those kinds of things.

V 25, Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? ‘the psuch’, the fullness of physical life, far “more than food and is not the body more than just clothing?”

Is that all there is in life? Is that all you are going to focus on? Frankly, that is the way it is in the world.

Most people in our world are totally consumed with the body. Just decorate the body, fix up the body, clothe the body, take care of the body, put it in a nice car, send it off to a nice house, stuff it full of nice food, sit in a nice comfortable chair, hang a bunch of jewellery all over the thing, take it out on a boat, let it swim, teach it to ski, take it on a cruise. The body, feed that body. That’s the way most people live.

Isn’t life more than that?

What are you worried about that for? The body isn’t the end of all. Life is not contained in this body. Life is contained in the very nature of God. I live, not because my body lives, but because God gives my body life! Life is more than the body, more than food, more than clothes.

You had never convinced people in our society of that, but it’s true.

So why worry about those things? Jesus gives three reasons why you shouldn’t worry. 1. Father 2. Faith

3. Future It is unnecessary because of your Father. It is uncharacteristic because of your Faith. It is unwise because of your Future. 1. Father.

• Why you should never worry about finances,
• Why you should never worry about the basics of life,
• Why you should never worry about what you eat, or drink, or wear,

It is unnecessary because of your Father. Jesus says it is unnecessary to worry about material things, even the necessities of life because of your Father.

Have you forgotten who your Father is? It’s so foolish. I can use my own children as an example. They don’t worry about whether they’re going to have clothes, a bed, something to drink.

That never enters their mind because they know enough about their father to know their father provides for them. They have absolutely no anxiety. Trust me, I don’t come close to being as faithful as God. Yet, how often we fail to believe that God is going to provide for us, and we worry. Anxiety is foolish.

The Lord gives three illustrations

• a) Food,
• b) Future,
• c) Fashion.

These are related to Him as our Father.

• a) Food.

V 26, Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

Are you not of more value than they? The Lord is standing on the hillside there, up in Galilee looking down over that beautiful north end of the sea. The breeze was rippling across. The sun was bright in the sky and the people were all gathered at His feet.

I could imagine and think as Jesus was speaking to them some birds flew across. One writer said that the north part of the area of Galilee is the crossroads of bird migration. It’s a very special place where the birds migrate in that part of the world.

Jesus probably saw them fly by and He said that. V 26, Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

Are you not of more value than they? Every bird that lives in this world lives because God gave it life. If God gives life to a bird, Does God say, “bird, I have done My part. I have given your life”. Now, you figure out how to keep it?

No! Birds don’t get together and say, “Now we have got to come up with a strategy to keep ourselves alive.” Birds have no self-consciousness, no cognitive processes, no ability to reason, but God planted within birds they have instinct. So that birds are planted with a divine capacity to find what is necessary to live.

God doesn’t just create life. He creates life and then sustains life.

Job 38:41, Who provides food for the raven, When its young ones cry to God, And wander about for lack of food?

It is God the Creator who gives the mother the instinct to bring the food. It is God the Creator who gave the mother the instinct to build the nest, and to migrate to a new area at the exact and precise time.

Psalm 147:9, He gives to the beast its food, And to the young ravens that cry.

The birds cry out to God. Now, if God is going to take care of irrational birds who cry out to Him through their instinct, is not God going to take care of His own children? At the end of verse 26, Are you not of more value than they?

God has provided for them and when they receive it and they are content. This solemnly demonstrates that man is more corrupt than other creatures. God takes care of the birds. Don’t you think He will take care of you?

Now by the way, this is not an excuse for idleness. V 26, Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Someone might say that I am just going to stand out there on the edge of a tree with my mouth open.

It never rains worms, never! Birds, God feeds through an instinct that tells them where to find that food, and they go for it. They work for it. They are busy searching around, gobbling up little insects, worms, preparing their nests, caring for their young, teaching them to fly, pushing them out at the right time, migrating with the seasons. They work hard.

All this work is to be done if they are going to eat, and yet they do it by instinct, and they never overdo it. They don’t say, “I am going to build bigger nests. I am going to store more worms. I am going to say to myself, ‘Bird, eat, drink and be merry.’”

They work within the framework of God’s design for them, and they never overindulge themselves.

Birds only get fat when people put them in cages. Birds don’t overdo a good thing. It’s men who have enough, and they go for more, and they stockpile, and they stuff, and they hoard, and they ignore God’s priorities and His promises, and they forfeit the carefree heart.

The birds just fly, they don’t worry where they are going to find the food, they just fly until they find it. God provides it.

• Birds can’t plan ahead.
• Birds have no reason to worry.

If birds don’t have any reason to worry, what are you worrying for?

Are you not much better than a bird? How silly.

You don’t think He will feed you? No bird was ever created in the image of Christ! No bird was ever made in the image of God! No bird was ever designed to be a joint heir with Jesus Christ throughout eternity. No bird ever has a place prepared for him in heaven in the Father’s house!

If God sustains the life of a bird, do you think He will take care of you?

Life is a gift from God. If God gives you the greater gift which is life, do you think He will not give you the lesser gift which is the sustaining of that life, by food? Of course. So don’t worry about that. If God lays it upon my heart to take my resources that I have right now that I have planned for the future, and He says in My heart I want you to do this. I don’t have any right to say, But, Lord, if I do that, what am I going to do tomorrow? I won’t have any food or anything to cloth my children.

If God asks for this now it becomes His responsibility to feed me tomorrow, and He will. If He gave me the greater gift of life, will He not give me the lesser gift to sustain that life? The gift of food. So, I, like a bird, must work but God has designed that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his of his brow. If I don’t work, I don’t eat.

2 Thessalonians 3:10, For even when we were with you, we commanded you this: If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.

Proverbs 13:4, The soul of a lazy man desires, and has nothing;

But the soul of the diligent shall be made rich.

Proverbs 20:4, The lazy man will not plough because of winter; He will beg during harvest and have nothing. So just like the bird, God provides but through instinct, so man

God provides through his effort. If God gives me the gift of life, then God will sustain me. “God wants nothing to do with the lazy gluttonous bellies who are neither concerned nor busy. They act as if they just had to sit and wait for Him to drop a roasted goose into their mouth.”

Martin Luther. Jesus is not saying do nothing. He is saying through your effort God will provide. Now people say, “Oh, yes, but we are running out of resources.” I hear this all the time. The world has no food. There’s so much food in this world. God is always in the business of an abundance.

This world hasn’t seen anything yet. Wait until we get to the millennium, and you see what happens around this world. Hasn’t the amount of food produced per person been dropping in the developing countries of the world over the last 25 years?

No. This is a common misconception. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2009a, 2009b) the world produces more than 1 1/2 times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That's already enough to feed 10 billion people, the world's 2050 projected population But just to give you an idea, so you are not going to worry about whether God can handle the current crisis.

As far as potential food production is concerned, the world could feed every single person in it on the standard of the U.S. consumption by using less than 10 percent of the agricultural land available on the earth. When God says, “I will provide,” He means He will provide.

Why don’t people have anything to eat? It is not because God doesn’t provide it.

I think it’s because they are not His children, and He has no obligation to them. Take for example, India. India has plenty of food to feed its people, but there’s starvation there. They allow sacred cows to eat 20 percent of all their food. The rodents and the rats that they believe are reincarnations of their ancestors eat 15 percent of it. That’s 35 percent of their food. It is not that they don’t have the resources.

They just don’t have the spiritual connection to God that puts them in the place of blessing. Their religion destroys them. There is plenty of food. God will provide as we are faithful to believe His Word. So, the thought is simple, then. You should never worry about your food because it is unnecessary because of your Father.

He provides food.

• b) Future

V 27, Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? Now, a cubit was the distance from your elbow to the tip of your finger. This is a cubit, and it’s approximately 18 inches give or take depending on the individual, but about 18 inches/46 cm, a cubit.

Nobody would want to add a foot and a half to his stature. I would be 7’ 5” and that would be a little unnecessary. So, there’s a better way to translate the word “stature,” hlikia and that is the word is used sometimes to mean “span of life.”

What Jesus is saying that “which of you by worrying can lengthen your life?” Not only will you not lengthen your life by worrying you will probably shorten it. You can’t lengthen your life! People are in a panic to lengthen their life by taking vitamins, health spas, and exercise. We are cultic about the body beautiful.

God has determined the times of the nations and bounded the life of a man. I believe that God has designed how long we live.

Am I saying exercise is useless? No! As long as I am going to live, I would like to increase the quality of my life. If I get exercise I function better, my brain works better, and I am happier and control of things.

But I am not going to kid myself that by running down the street every day I am going to force God to let me live longer. Our world has missed the point. We spend a literal fortune joining spas, buying vitamins by the tons, visiting every doctor in sight to get a physical, every special diet conceivable. All we want to do is lengthen our life.

The fear of death which is we don’t want to die. We want to live longer, and longer and worry & worry. You are going to make yourself miserable in the process. When you worry about how long your life is, and fret and fume.

When you worry about adding onto your life you are distrusting God and that’s foolish because God, if you give Him your life, and you are obedient to Him, will give you the fullness of days. I believe that the gift of life is a gift that comes because God wants you to live for spiritual reasons.

In the Old Testament it was obedience that lengthened life. So, as we live a righteous life there’s a reason for us to be around. God gives us life,

We are His children, God bounds our life by His sovereign decree, and God wants us to live that life to its fullest. Sure, exercise helps, and health helps, because it keeps alert and alive to the limits of our capacity while we are living that span. But we can’t worry ourselves into a longer life.

What are you worried about? You are going to live the fullness of life if you are obedient to God. He will give you all your days!

• c) Fashion.

There are some people who live for their clothes. The most important place in their whole world is the closet. They go in there and they open the door and it’s so jammed together you can’t keep it from getting wrinkled. The closet, they live for clothes.

V 28, “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; Now in those times if you were poor, and you didn’t have any resources.

The streams dried up, The crops didn’t come, and They got no money. They couldn’t buy anything. In our day maybe it isn’t that we are so worried that we can’t have anything, but in our society, we worry about the fact that maybe what we wear isn’t really what’s in.

The pants don’t go like that anymore. Or, “I can’t wear that. I wore that last Sunday.” People live for clothes. They manifest a carnal, selfish, worldly, materialistic care for clothes. It isn’t so much that they are afraid they will have nothing to wear.

It is that they were afraid they won’t be able to stand up and look their best and feed their pride. Lusting after costly clothes is a sin and it’s a sin in our society. All you have to do is walk through a mall. It’s unbelievable how much stuff is hanging on those racks, unbelievable. I don’t know how those stores can sustain the inventory.

We have made a god out of fashion. We sinfully indulge in a money mad spending spree to buy ourselves the things that drape all over this body and have nothing to do with the beauty of the character.

1 Peter 3:3-5, Do not let your adornment be merely outward—arranging the hair, wearing gold, or putting on fine apparel— 4 rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God. 5 For in this manner, in former times, the holy women who trusted in God also adorned themselves, being submissive to their own husbands,

We worry we don’t have enough. We don’t look good enough. When the Lord Jesus who owned only what He wore on His back was the loveliest who ever lived. V 28, “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; Take a look at the field lilies.

Now if you were to look at the field lilies you would say all the wildflowers that graced the rolling hills of Galilee, and there were many. There were the anemones, and there was the gladiolus, the iris, the narcissi, and what they called the little cap lilies. There were such lovely little things.

All these flowers were all over those hillsides. They even had the prettiest of all, little scarlet-coloured poppies that would

grow for such a brief season. But the hillsides of Galilee at the right time of year would be dotted with all the brightness of these lovely flowers. Jesus just turned His arm as they were sitting right there on the grass, right on the grass on the side of the hill and He said, Look at the field lilies. They don’t spin and they don’t toil.

They don’t make fancy thread and hang it all over them. There’s a free and an easy beauty. You can take the glorious material, the most beautiful thing that was ever made for the greatest monarch like Solomon and put it under a microscope and it will look like sackcloth.

Take the petal of a flower and put it under a microscope and you will see the difference. There’s a texture, a form, a design, a substance, and a colour that man with all his ingenuity can’t even touch. “How do they grow?”

Easily, freely, gorgeously, effortlessly they flourish. It’s an indictment of our day that we spend so much time and effort.

They keep changing the fashion on us all the time. This is out and this is in, and it goes so fast that you cannot keep up with it. They keep changing it on us to force us to be preoccupied. You go into a clothing store, and it is literally an assault on your mind and your eyes. They set the atmosphere.

Now they have got app which can show how you will look in that outfit. V 29, and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Solomon had no garment with that texture. He had no way to approximate the fragile beauty, the incredible design of a flower.

Now what He’s saying is when you’ve done it all to yourself you can’t do what God can do with one little, tiny flower. Why do you spend such an effort for such a result? Then Jesus makes the point from the lesser to the greater.

V 30, Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

Do you know what they used to do with that old grass? The women in that part of the world had these little hearth situations where they cooked and they had a fire, and they had an oven which was basically a thick clay oven, made all the way around with a little door. They would build a fire, and they would take this thick earthen oven and they would place it on top of the fire.

They would let the fire heat that earth until finally it would seep in and heat the inside, and then they would open the door and put in whatever they wanted to cook. But if the fire had grown low or they were in a kind of a hurry and they couldn’t wait for all the heat to get inside, they would start a fire on the inside of that little oven.

The historians tell us that they had a very simple way of doing it. They would go into the field, and they would find the dried grass that had become brittle. They would find the flowers that had died and fallen over, and they would gather the little stalks of the flowers, grass, and they would use. Putting it into the oven and lighting it on fire to start a fire on the inside that would move out that would meet the fire coming from the outside to evenly warm the oven.

That is exactly what our Lord is saying.

• Don’t worry about what you wear.
• Don’t worry about how long you live.
• Don’t worry about what you are going to eat and drink.

God takes care of all that.

• God will give you food.
• God will give you clothing.
• God will determine the length of your life and sustain it.

That’s very tangible stuff. You have no grounds for financial worry if your heart is right. The key is V 33, "You seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness and all these things will be added.” The key is you put your heart and your treasure in heaven and God will take care of all the earthly things.

I don’t want to give one minute a day thinking about physical, mundane earthly things. God’s going to take care of that. Wildflower said to the sparrow, “I should really like to know why these anxious human beings rush about and worry so.”

“Well, I think that it must be that they have no heavenly Father such as cares for you and me.” Sparrow answered the wildflower!

Maybe we ought to learn from the birds and the flowers how to live life. Jesus says, “Don’t worry. It is unnecessary because of your Father.” Lord, we do not want to be those of little faith. We do not want to be those who don’t believe.

We want to be those who are free to soar the heights, free to walk in the heavenlies, free to invest in eternity because we take no thought for what we eat or drink or with what we shall be clothed. That is Your area. Thank You for that.

Personal testimony

In 2005 when I started out in the ministry, I made a determination in my mind that I would never put a price on my ministry. I would never, I would never ask for any money, ever, under any condition. I would never ask for a salary. I would never seek anything but the kingdom and His righteousness.

I can tell you from my own personal testimony after 12 years as a pastor and 17 years in the ministry of living that way, seeking the kingdom and not always being totally faithful as I would want to be, but as I have matured in seeking the kingdom, I have seen God take care of the physical.

He does it, and He does it with generosity. That’s what He promises His children. I refuse to worry about that. There is too much evidence of His care in the past. I can believe Him in the future. I hope you can, too