Don't Worry

[bluidkiti]

“Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothes?”

Matthew 6:25 (CEB)

Part of the reason we spend time with Jesus is to listen to what He says and then try to live as He would if He were in our place. We ask ourselves, What would Jesus do? We try to answer that question with our lives as best we can.

So these words of Jesus—read the full context in Matthew 6:19–34—seem to tell us that Jesus would not worry. If we want to experience His presence, and live as He would in our place, we need to find a way to let go of worry.

If you ask almost anyone to list biblical “sins,” they’ll likely offer you a list that includes adultery, lust, greed, murder, etc. Few, if any, would list “worry.” Yet Jesus tells His followers, including you and me, not to worry. So if Jesus said don’t do it, then doing it is a sin, right? But many of us seem to be expert worriers. We worry about what will happen if certain people get elected or don’t, we worry about our kids, our money or our church. We watch the evening news and our faith flickers. Our faith is cloaked in fear.

When life is really hard, or challenges come your way, sometimes worry feels inevitable, impossible to avoid. But what if worry is a choice—and it’s always the wrong choice? Why would Jesus say, “Don’t worry,” unless we actually had a choice to make?

Faith Step: What are you worried about today? Write it down on a piece of paper. Then, deliberately choose not to worry about that thing. Choose instead to trust. Shred or burn the paper.

—Keri Wyatt Kent