Antidote to Anxiety (05-06-12)
Antidote to Anxiety Ken Shigematsu
Big Idea: When we know that God provides, we can be free from fear and free to seek his Kingdom first.
Long after finishing school, I had this recurring dream—I mean nightmare that I was back in school. I had forgotten to attend math class or French class all semester long, it’s now too deep into the term to drop the course, and I have a major exam to write.
Do you have anxieties? Anxieties about school or work or relationships or money?
According to a recent Ipsos-Reid poll most Canadians do NOT believe they will have enough funds to cover their expenses if they became ill and unable to work.
Do you worry about health or perhaps some trouble half-way around the world?
If so, you’re in good company. TIME magazine has said anxiety is the most prevailing quality of modern culture.
Not all anxiety, of course, is bad. Recently a 27-year-old woman working on a re-forestation project north of Fort Nelson was mauled by a black bear. She’s been recovering in an Edmonton hospital, with bites to her scalp, ear and legs. She says adrenalin helped her to survive.
Anxiety can trigger the adrenalin we need to either “fight or flight.”
But a lot of anxiety can be damaging. As we know anxiety can produce ulcers and can make us more vulnerable to all kind of illnesses.
Most of our anxiety is likely unhealthy and useless.
I heard of someone who disagrees. Wally Morgan says, “Don’t tell me worry is useless. When I worry about something, the thing I worry about almost never happens.”
In our text today in the Sermon on the Mount we’re going to look at what Jesus says about dealing with anxiety.
If you have your Bibles please turn to Matthew 6:19
(I want to say that if you have Panic Anxiety Disorder or if your body is not releasing enough natural tranquilizers like Cortisone or Cortisol, it may be that you need to not only pray, but see your doctor. There’s no shame in that.)
Treasures in Heaven
19"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
22"The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. 23But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
24"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.
25"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? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life[a]?
28"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
In verse 25 we read the word, “Therefore.” Whenever you see a “therefore” in Scripture you must ask yourself what is it there for? What is it referring back to?
In the preceding context, we see that Jesus is talking about 3 things. He talks about treasure, vision, and masters (Last Sunday I spoke on Treasure and Money and you can pick up the tape or cd). All these things tie in directly to Jesus’ words on worry and anxiety in vss 25 to the end of the chapter 6.
Jesus encourages us (in vss 19-21) not to focus on hoarding up treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.
People often seek to accumulate worldly riches in order to create security for themselves.
But the irony is the more we invest in things that we think will create safety for us, the more we tend to experience anxiety.
We buy a stock (which also interesting called a security) and we become anxious about the performance of the company we’re investing in; we buy a computer and we hope it’s not a lemon so we fork out money for an extended warranty or for an on site service option, we buy a home and then we buy home insurance for it and we buy a security system or a big dog in order to secure our things.
We think that having things will provide us with a certain level of security, but the more things we have the more we have to be anxious about.
But, if our primary treasure is not on earth but in heaven, because we have invested in heaven, in God, in people… in things that will last forever, we will have the peace comes having a treasure that can never be taken from us.
2nd Jesus speaks in the preceding text about vision.
If our focus is on material things and the passing treasures of this world Jesus (in vss 22-23) says that our eye, like a blind person’s, will not be able to take in light, we lose our perspective AND as result of the that we will experience anxiety.
If our life is built on a passing treasure whether it’s money, our career, our physical beauty and we lose things, we’ll experience great anxiety…
If our treasure is the Lord and we lose our money, our career, our physical beauty… we’ll experience sadness, but we won’t experience debilitating anxiety, because we know that in our Lord, we have a treasure that is better and longer lasting than anything on earth.
Third, Jesus speaks about having the right master: God, not money. Often people will seek to make money because they think that money will serve them and will set them free hopefully before age 65. So people talk about “Freedom (at) 55”… “Freedom (at) 45.” But what often ends up happening is that people who are focused on money end up not being free at all. They become slaves to money.
There’s a relatively new term called “Affluenza” which describes a person who is sick because they are addicted to making money…
Sam Walton’s wife, Helen, kept saying to her husband we’re making a good living, how many more stores do we need? Why keep expanding, the Wal-Marts are getting further and further away. She said after the 17th store, “I couldn’t stop him.” Affluenza.
John D. Rockefellor was asked how much money it would to take to a make a person happy, “Just a little bit more” he said. Affluenza.
If money is our master we will be driven and anxious.
But if our master is God, we will be at peace.
Jesus says, “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? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
Jesus is arguing here from the lesser to the greater… He argues that if God cares for relatively small things like birds and grass, will he not also take care of us? If his eye is on the sparrow, you can know he watches us.
This aspect of God’s character that provides is called providence…
But God like a very loving human being may provide does people in general, there is a special sense in which God provides for those who turn him as their father.
There is someone I know who in the last couple of years has been turning his life toward God…
This person is a gifted writer for magazines.
As result of the being in the “wrong place and at wrong time” the person ended up spending time in prison as a crime suspect.
He told me about how his reading glasses got picked with the laundry in prison. That prison had over 500 inmates and a lot of sheets, clothes etc. He was told, “Give up hope of ever seeing them again.” But, getting a new pair of glasses in prison could take quite a long time. As a professional writer and as someone who was reading a book every two days and so this was no small dilemma.
He prayed that his glasses would be returned and the very next day they were, in perfect condition as well. The guard on duty said, “You I must be doing something right as that has never happened before.”
Back in the 90’s in response to invitation from a local government in Actau, Kazakhstan, I went there to I gave a series of lectures to public teachers on teaching ethics in a post-communist era. I used the 10 commandments as my starting point.
At end of my closing lecture, I said it’s important to have a knowledge of ethics, but the more important issue is whether you have the will to do the right thing. I said in my own life having a personal through Jesus Christ has given me the will to choose to the right thing…
If you would like to pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and my Lord Jesus Christ, I want to give you that in the opportunity now to speak to pray to him in the silence of your heart.
A few people prayed to receive Christ.
We were in this desert region, when you turned on the facet, all you would get was a few drops of what look apricot juice: rusty water.
One of the women who prayed to receive Christ, then prayed that God would give her running water… She went home turned on the tap and out came crystal clear water…. She checked with her neighbors in her apartment who were on the same water pipe system and they said, said weren’t don’t have any water, just a little bit of wet rust.
This was an early indicator for this woman that God provides.
Eugene Peterson in his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction says… that
The Christian life is going to God. In going to God, Christians travel the same ground that everyone else walks on, breath the same air, drink the same water, shop in the same stores, read the same newspapers, are citizens under the same government, pay the same prices for groceries and gasoline, fear the same dangers, are subject to the same pressures, get the same distresses, are buried in the same ground.
The difference is that each step we walk, each breath we breathe, we know we are preserved by God, we know we are accompanied by God, we know we are ruled by God.
If this is the case… then our lives don’t need to be consumed with worldly building security, the stuff we eat and drink… the treasures of this world…
Jesus says, 31So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
When we know that God is watching over us and will provide for our needs, we don’t need to be consumed with our security, with accumulating temporal treasures… we can use the energy that would otherwise be directed to these things on focusing on God and his work and his reign in the world…
Jesus said, “Seek First the Kingdom of God and His righteousness…”
Between undergrad and seminary I remember being interviewed by SONY in Tokyo.
I remember walking going up a high rise at Sony Building in Ginza, Tokyo. Walking into the board room with a long board room table and 3 men other side and a secretary sitting quite a ways down to take notes.
I was intimidated.
At one point in the interview, the manager in the middle (the big guy, square jaw, and gruff voice) asked, “If we were to hire you, would stay long term?”
I said, “If I was hired by you I’d be very committed for that time period, but I’m hoping to go into ministry one day.”
“So which branch of the government are you hoping to work, finance, trade and industry?”
“I’m a Christian, I am hoping very one day become the minister of a church.”
The manager in the middle, furrowed his brow, and asked “WHY?”
It got really tense.
I said, I think becoming a minister would be the best way for me to use my gifts in serving the world.
That’s all I could think of at the time. Later I thought… the reason I want to go into ministry is because I so want my life to be invested in things that will last forever.
For me personally the best way would be through vocational ministry. But through you the best way to invest in eternal things may be through the marketplace (I loved working for Sony and had opportunities to reach out to business and government leader that are not as readily accessible as a minister of local church). God may you to invest in eternal things in the marketplace, medicine, or education, or on the construction site, tour guide, or as a homemaker or an as artist or a pray-er.
If you are follower of Jesus, the question is not will you invest your life in eternal things, in things of God, but where and how?
Because when you are called to be a follow Jesus Christ you are called to invest not in things that will last on into eternity.
You’re called to live for a better and longer lasting treasure.
You are called to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.
Jesus says when you do this, you will be provided for.
Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these other things will be added to you as well.
Jesus says “If you serve me in the Living room of your life, I will make sure that there is a steady supply coming for in you’re through the kitchen of your life.
I know that is true. The first ministry job in ministry I took out of seminary paid $200 per month. Yeah, those were US dollars, but trust me $200 even if you adjust for the exchange rate and inflation was not a lot. But God always provided that I needed and more.
Some day hike through some B.C. see how God feeds the birds and paints the wild flowers… and let these preach on how God provides.
The irony is if we seek the first the world, we get neither God nor the world in the end. We may well get affuenza or one of it’s cousins be spiritually sick and we will die and we will lose everything.
We seek God first, we get God and we get the world thrown in too, we what get what we need in this life and become inheritors of the new heaven and a new earth.
Queen Elizabeth not the current one but the 1st Queen Elizabeth was looking for a skilled navigator to explore what was then considered the “new world.” She hired the equivalent of what we would call a head-hunter, a recruiter and he came upwith the name of one person who seemed head and shoulders above the other candidates in terms of navigational skill.
The Queen and said, I need your navigational skills to explore the new world. I want you to lead an expedition for me.”
The man said, “Your majesty, God knows I love my country, but I a man who’s married with several children and I just started a new business. If go out to sea now, my new business will flounder and my family will suffer.
The queen said, “If shall you take care of my business, I’ll take shall take of yours.”
That’s a great deal.
And God is saying “If you take of my business, I’ll take of yours.”
I don’t know about you, but I want to live that way…
Pray.
Let’s take time to pray and respond to the Holy Spirit’s work in us.
Big Idea: When we know that God provides, we can be free from fear and free to seek his Kingdom first.
Long after finishing school, I had this recurring dream—I mean nightmare that I was back in school. I had forgotten to attend math class or French class all semester long, it’s now too deep into the term to drop the course, and I have a major exam to write.
Do you have anxieties? Anxieties about school or work or relationships or money?
According to a recent Ipsos-Reid poll most Canadians do NOT believe they will have enough funds to cover their expenses if they became ill and unable to work.
Do you worry about health or perhaps some trouble half-way around the world?
If so, you’re in good company. TIME magazine has said anxiety is the most prevailing quality of modern culture.
Not all anxiety, of course, is bad. Recently a 27-year-old woman working on a re-forestation project north of Fort Nelson was mauled by a black bear. She’s been recovering in an Edmonton hospital, with bites to her scalp, ear and legs. She says adrenalin helped her to survive.
Anxiety can trigger the adrenalin we need to either “fight or flight.”
But a lot of anxiety can be damaging. As we know anxiety can produce ulcers and can make us more vulnerable to all kind of illnesses.
Most of our anxiety is likely unhealthy and useless.
I heard of someone who disagrees. Wally Morgan says, “Don’t tell me worry is useless. When I worry about something, the thing I worry about almost never happens.”
In our text today in the Sermon on the Mount we’re going to look at what Jesus says about dealing with anxiety.
If you have your Bibles please turn to Matthew 6:19
(I want to say that if you have Panic Anxiety Disorder or if your body is not releasing enough natural tranquilizers like Cortisone or Cortisol, it may be that you need to not only pray, but see your doctor. There’s no shame in that.)
Treasures in Heaven
19"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
22"The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. 23But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
24"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.
25"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? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life[a]?
28"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
In verse 25 we read the word, “Therefore.” Whenever you see a “therefore” in Scripture you must ask yourself what is it there for? What is it referring back to?
In the preceding context, we see that Jesus is talking about 3 things. He talks about treasure, vision, and masters (Last Sunday I spoke on Treasure and Money and you can pick up the tape or cd). All these things tie in directly to Jesus’ words on worry and anxiety in vss 25 to the end of the chapter 6.
Jesus encourages us (in vss 19-21) not to focus on hoarding up treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.
People often seek to accumulate worldly riches in order to create security for themselves.
But the irony is the more we invest in things that we think will create safety for us, the more we tend to experience anxiety.
We buy a stock (which also interesting called a security) and we become anxious about the performance of the company we’re investing in; we buy a computer and we hope it’s not a lemon so we fork out money for an extended warranty or for an on site service option, we buy a home and then we buy home insurance for it and we buy a security system or a big dog in order to secure our things.
We think that having things will provide us with a certain level of security, but the more things we have the more we have to be anxious about.
But, if our primary treasure is not on earth but in heaven, because we have invested in heaven, in God, in people… in things that will last forever, we will have the peace comes having a treasure that can never be taken from us.
2nd Jesus speaks in the preceding text about vision.
If our focus is on material things and the passing treasures of this world Jesus (in vss 22-23) says that our eye, like a blind person’s, will not be able to take in light, we lose our perspective AND as result of the that we will experience anxiety.
If our life is built on a passing treasure whether it’s money, our career, our physical beauty and we lose things, we’ll experience great anxiety…
If our treasure is the Lord and we lose our money, our career, our physical beauty… we’ll experience sadness, but we won’t experience debilitating anxiety, because we know that in our Lord, we have a treasure that is better and longer lasting than anything on earth.
Third, Jesus speaks about having the right master: God, not money. Often people will seek to make money because they think that money will serve them and will set them free hopefully before age 65. So people talk about “Freedom (at) 55”… “Freedom (at) 45.” But what often ends up happening is that people who are focused on money end up not being free at all. They become slaves to money.
There’s a relatively new term called “Affluenza” which describes a person who is sick because they are addicted to making money…
Sam Walton’s wife, Helen, kept saying to her husband we’re making a good living, how many more stores do we need? Why keep expanding, the Wal-Marts are getting further and further away. She said after the 17th store, “I couldn’t stop him.” Affluenza.
John D. Rockefellor was asked how much money it would to take to a make a person happy, “Just a little bit more” he said. Affluenza.
If money is our master we will be driven and anxious.
But if our master is God, we will be at peace.
Jesus says, “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? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
Jesus is arguing here from the lesser to the greater… He argues that if God cares for relatively small things like birds and grass, will he not also take care of us? If his eye is on the sparrow, you can know he watches us.
This aspect of God’s character that provides is called providence…
But God like a very loving human being may provide does people in general, there is a special sense in which God provides for those who turn him as their father.
There is someone I know who in the last couple of years has been turning his life toward God…
This person is a gifted writer for magazines.
As result of the being in the “wrong place and at wrong time” the person ended up spending time in prison as a crime suspect.
He told me about how his reading glasses got picked with the laundry in prison. That prison had over 500 inmates and a lot of sheets, clothes etc. He was told, “Give up hope of ever seeing them again.” But, getting a new pair of glasses in prison could take quite a long time. As a professional writer and as someone who was reading a book every two days and so this was no small dilemma.
He prayed that his glasses would be returned and the very next day they were, in perfect condition as well. The guard on duty said, “You I must be doing something right as that has never happened before.”
Back in the 90’s in response to invitation from a local government in Actau, Kazakhstan, I went there to I gave a series of lectures to public teachers on teaching ethics in a post-communist era. I used the 10 commandments as my starting point.
At end of my closing lecture, I said it’s important to have a knowledge of ethics, but the more important issue is whether you have the will to do the right thing. I said in my own life having a personal through Jesus Christ has given me the will to choose to the right thing…
If you would like to pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and my Lord Jesus Christ, I want to give you that in the opportunity now to speak to pray to him in the silence of your heart.
A few people prayed to receive Christ.
We were in this desert region, when you turned on the facet, all you would get was a few drops of what look apricot juice: rusty water.
One of the women who prayed to receive Christ, then prayed that God would give her running water… She went home turned on the tap and out came crystal clear water…. She checked with her neighbors in her apartment who were on the same water pipe system and they said, said weren’t don’t have any water, just a little bit of wet rust.
This was an early indicator for this woman that God provides.
Eugene Peterson in his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction says… that
The Christian life is going to God. In going to God, Christians travel the same ground that everyone else walks on, breath the same air, drink the same water, shop in the same stores, read the same newspapers, are citizens under the same government, pay the same prices for groceries and gasoline, fear the same dangers, are subject to the same pressures, get the same distresses, are buried in the same ground.
The difference is that each step we walk, each breath we breathe, we know we are preserved by God, we know we are accompanied by God, we know we are ruled by God.
If this is the case… then our lives don’t need to be consumed with worldly building security, the stuff we eat and drink… the treasures of this world…
Jesus says, 31So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
When we know that God is watching over us and will provide for our needs, we don’t need to be consumed with our security, with accumulating temporal treasures… we can use the energy that would otherwise be directed to these things on focusing on God and his work and his reign in the world…
Jesus said, “Seek First the Kingdom of God and His righteousness…”
Between undergrad and seminary I remember being interviewed by SONY in Tokyo.
I remember walking going up a high rise at Sony Building in Ginza, Tokyo. Walking into the board room with a long board room table and 3 men other side and a secretary sitting quite a ways down to take notes.
I was intimidated.
At one point in the interview, the manager in the middle (the big guy, square jaw, and gruff voice) asked, “If we were to hire you, would stay long term?”
I said, “If I was hired by you I’d be very committed for that time period, but I’m hoping to go into ministry one day.”
“So which branch of the government are you hoping to work, finance, trade and industry?”
“I’m a Christian, I am hoping very one day become the minister of a church.”
The manager in the middle, furrowed his brow, and asked “WHY?”
It got really tense.
I said, I think becoming a minister would be the best way for me to use my gifts in serving the world.
That’s all I could think of at the time. Later I thought… the reason I want to go into ministry is because I so want my life to be invested in things that will last forever.
For me personally the best way would be through vocational ministry. But through you the best way to invest in eternal things may be through the marketplace (I loved working for Sony and had opportunities to reach out to business and government leader that are not as readily accessible as a minister of local church). God may you to invest in eternal things in the marketplace, medicine, or education, or on the construction site, tour guide, or as a homemaker or an as artist or a pray-er.
If you are follower of Jesus, the question is not will you invest your life in eternal things, in things of God, but where and how?
Because when you are called to be a follow Jesus Christ you are called to invest not in things that will last on into eternity.
You’re called to live for a better and longer lasting treasure.
You are called to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.
Jesus says when you do this, you will be provided for.
Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these other things will be added to you as well.
Jesus says “If you serve me in the Living room of your life, I will make sure that there is a steady supply coming for in you’re through the kitchen of your life.
I know that is true. The first ministry job in ministry I took out of seminary paid $200 per month. Yeah, those were US dollars, but trust me $200 even if you adjust for the exchange rate and inflation was not a lot. But God always provided that I needed and more.
Some day hike through some B.C. see how God feeds the birds and paints the wild flowers… and let these preach on how God provides.
The irony is if we seek the first the world, we get neither God nor the world in the end. We may well get affuenza or one of it’s cousins be spiritually sick and we will die and we will lose everything.
We seek God first, we get God and we get the world thrown in too, we what get what we need in this life and become inheritors of the new heaven and a new earth.
Queen Elizabeth not the current one but the 1st Queen Elizabeth was looking for a skilled navigator to explore what was then considered the “new world.” She hired the equivalent of what we would call a head-hunter, a recruiter and he came upwith the name of one person who seemed head and shoulders above the other candidates in terms of navigational skill.
The Queen and said, I need your navigational skills to explore the new world. I want you to lead an expedition for me.”
The man said, “Your majesty, God knows I love my country, but I a man who’s married with several children and I just started a new business. If go out to sea now, my new business will flounder and my family will suffer.
The queen said, “If shall you take care of my business, I’ll take shall take of yours.”
That’s a great deal.
And God is saying “If you take of my business, I’ll take of yours.”
I don’t know about you, but I want to live that way…
Pray.
Let’s take time to pray and respond to the Holy Spirit’s work in us.
posted by Shigematsu at 7:10 PM
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