A lady visited the doctor and told him that she was feeling rather run-down. As far as she could tell, her “get and go” had got up and gone. After listening and then examining his patient, the doctor replied, “Madam, it is my expert opinion that you are not all run-down, but you are all wound up.”
That diagnosis describes a lot of people today—wound up in knots of anxiety and apprehension. They are worried about losing their house to the bank, their job to overseas, their sons to war, their spouse to another, their freedoms to a judge, their life to cancer, and even their salvation to sin. Some people are worried about the fact that they are not worried. But, while we wrestle with worry, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount challenges us to come to grips with it and to flat out stop it (Matt. 6:25, 34). He commands us to cease and desist. The Lord Jesus sees worry not as an illness that needs to be treated but as a sin that needs to be repented of and stopped. Why?
One, because worry is fruitless (Matt. 6:27)! Worry is a futile exercise; in that it doesn’t add a single hour to anyone’s life. It is a lot of work for nothing. In fact, it makes things worse, not better, because it makes us unfit to deal with the situation that has us so uptight in the first place. It distracts our ability to focus, and it leaves us feeling tired and tense. Worry doesn’t change a thing except the person who is worrying, and it is not for the good. Someone has rightly said, “Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.”
Two, because worry is faithless (Matt. 6:30)! The worrier is someone whose faith is small. According to Jesus, the disciples were deficient in their trust toward God. They were not reflecting on God’s past and promised faithfulness. They lacked faith in the faithfulness of God, and that which is not of faith is sin (Rom. 14:23; Heb. 11:6). Anxiety, then, is not only a waste of emotional energy but also an expression of spiritual forgetfulness and faithlessness. Anxiety envisages circumstances that may never occur or cannot be changed while forgetting truths about God’s unchanging character and care.
Three, because worry is fatherless (Matt. 6:31–32)! Jesus understands that an orphaned world without God and hope scurries around in fits of anxiety, but what He doesn’t understand is the anxiety of those whom God has adopted into His family by grace. Children from caring homes with good fathers don’t worry, and neither should those belonging to God’s family. Worry is practical atheism and an affront to our Father in heaven.
Worry is no respectable sin; it is fruitless, faithless, and fatherless!