WORRY VS. TRUST
Sermon Text, St. Matthew 6:24-34 (v. 25-26, 28-31). “Therefore 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? 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? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry.”
Lord, this is Your Word, and these are Your words. Sanctify us by the truth. Your Word is truth. Lord, You know how easily we worry despite Your promise. You know how we tend to be joyful and secure only if we think we have all that we need. Help us to take everything we possess as being from Your hand and be equally content in scarcity as we are in abundance. Help us through all the ups and downs in life to be just as glad, secure, and certain that You care for us and give what we need. Amen.
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ: Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
In these verses, Jesus says over and over again: “Do not worry.” Worry is the opposite of trust. What is trust? It’s faith being active.
We know that faith is a gift from God through His Word. Faith is passively received by us. It isn’t a work that you do. Faith is worked by the Holy Spirit. We have faith, and faith is kept, by His doing alone. We know this from the Bible but not from experience. What we know from experience is that faith is hard; faith is work. It’s because the way we experience faith is trusting.
Trust is how you experience the doing of faith. Trust is faith of the heart, relying on God and His promises. The essence of faith is trusting. What faith looks like is trusting, relying on God despite what you experience in life. The ups and downs of life are why trust is hard, and we have worries.
The opposite of trust is worry. Worry is how you show you’re not doing the doing of faith. You’re not relying on God and His promises. You’re not being dependent on God. You’re really depending on yourself – your own resources. You’re listening to the prospect that God might not take care of you; you have to do the job yourself, or through some other means.
We can’t imagine not worrying. We worry about everything! We worry all the time. Jesus’ words here assume we’re already worrying. Where He says, “Do not worry,” a literal translation would be: “stop worrying!” We come out of the womb worrying. Babies worry that they’ll never get another meal. We connect worries to identifiable things. You have health worries. You have money worries. You have safety worries. They’re worries for yourself, or for loved ones. You have worries about your job or future employment. Worries for the church. Worries for the nation. Worries about terrorist attacks.
Worry is not always that conscious of a thought. It’s also called anxiety. Another way to translate Jesus’ statement “Do not worry” is, “Do not be anxious.” Where this speech is recorded in Luke, Jesus calls it having “an anxious mind” (12:29). Today we might think it’s impossible not to be anxious. We live in an anxiety-inducing world. People can have generalized anxiety.
Jesus connects this worry and anxiety to “mammon,” which can mean just money, but it’s more than that – it’s all our possessions, our work, plus our busyness, keeping up friendships, running a home, all your responsibilities, plus all the fun. Truly, money is a major worry, and that worry does keep people from being generous in church offerings or in life. Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and mammon,” then says, “Therefore do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on.” This is “all that I need to support this body and life.”
Worry is a failure to trust God. But what’s underneath worry is the real sin: idolatry, as Jesus points out as He says “after all these things the Gentiles [heathen] seek.” He’s urging us not to live with a sort of practical atheism where you put your trust in yourself, or the government, or in making wise decisions, being more careful and perfect about everything.
Jesus uses the illustration of the birds of the air that don’t have anyone but God seeing to all their needs. Then He uses another object lesson: the grass and flowers that don’t do anything but get rained on and blown by the wind.
Martin Luther commented on this: “He is making the birds our teachers. Look at what the dear little birds do. Their life is completely unconcerned. They wait for their food solely from the hands of God. Sometimes people cage them up to hear them sing. But when they are free in the air, they are happier. They sing and leave their cares to our Lord God, even when they have young that have to be fed. We, who have the Scriptures, do not have enough wisdom to imitate the birds. When we listen to the little birds singing every day, we are listening to our own embarrassment before God. A little finch, which cannot speak or read, is man’s master in the Scriptures.”
As Luther points out, this is a First Commandment problem. Think of everything that worry or anxiety produces.
It produces complaining about why something is not being solved. It produces irritation that causes you be impatient with others and even lash out at them. It produces restless anxiety that is always waiting for life to turn out perfect and keeps you from performing the duties of your vocation.
Worry or anxiety also keep you from noticing the needs of “one another,” as today’s epistle lesson from Galatians 5 and 6 says. “Envying one another” comes when you worry or when you compare your life to others’. Then you don’t “bear one another’s burdens,” since you’re full of your own burdens. You don’t have patience with one another, or time for one another.
All of this can produce a bad conscience. Rather than responding defens-ively or giving in to worry by saying, “Everyone worries,” or “I just can’t help worrying,” or getting discouraged, examining this as a First Commandment problem should lead you to do one thing: repent. Repent that you don’t trust God as you should. This might be embarrassing, as Luther said the birds embarrass us by comparison, but do you know what this repenting is?
It’s trust! When you confess your sins in church, after saying “we poor sinners confess unto You that we have sinned against You,” you say: “Therefore we flee for refuge to Your infinite mercy, seeking and imploring Your grace, for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is trust! Fleeing for refuge to Him, depending on His mercy and kindness to you. Trust is resting in His arms.
This is the Gospel. The Gospel, not the Law, is the only thing that can produce trust. So when Jesus says, “Do not worry,” if it’s only Law, a command, as in the First Commandment, it can’t help you do it. But Jesus’ statement isn’t just Law. It’s Gospel. “Do not worry” – “stop worrying” – is like when Jesus says, “Fear not!” or “stop being afraid.” It’s an invitation, since He’s saying it. When you hold onto Jesus during a storm, you can’t be afraid. When you cling to Jesus in the midst of trouble, you can’t worry. This is trust.
This brings us back to being children of our heavenly Father. That’s where Jesus takes us in our worry: that “your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.” Remember how we are His children: through Jesus, the very one speaking these words! That’s what “seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” is about: the salvation Jesus won being given to you by faith. Then “all these things will be added to you.”
This is how you cast all your worry and anxiety on Him who cares for you.
You see how He cares for you on the cross. There God cared for all your needs for eternity. Jesus took all your sin onto Himself, all the burden, also all the sins done against you, all your hurt, and all anxiety, depression, any kind of unwellness mentally and emotionally, all that’s wrong. All that you’ve lost or will lose. He Himself entered into your anguish and fear. He anguished. He went to the cross with it. He took care of it all for you. He cared for you – cares about you – this much! He cares for you by bringing you what He won on the cross – forgiveness for all sin, which He gives you in Baptism and His Supper. God cares for you! If you doubt this, look to the cross.
Jesus is never more your Friend than when you’re worried. He has “made clear the way to the Father’s high throne where I may approach Him in Christ’s name alone.” (ELH 182:8, ed.) This is what to do with worries: bring them to the Father’s throne of mercy. To pray. In this way your worry undoes the devil’s work. He thinks worry is one of his best weapons to defeat your faith. But it’s one of God’s greatest tools. Worry leads you to pray. Your failures to trust lead you to ask for help. You bring your First Commandment sins to the Lord.
What do you do with your embarrassment that you don’t trust? You bring it to Him. He forgives you. Jesus became a man, was tempted to not trust, but perfectly committed Himself into the Father’s hands. You’re saved by His faith, His perfect trusting that counts for you as though you perfectly trusted. When the Father looks at you He sees – for Jesus’ sake – a truster, not a worrier. He sees no sins of worry, only faith.
But not only do you bring the guilt over your worrying to Him. In the words “Our Father who art in heaven,” He is hereby tenderly inviting you to approach him as His own child through baptism coming to Him who by your faith is your true Father, and to come “with boldness and confidence.”
That means to bring your worries, the big ones and the little ones, to Him. Even your worries that you can’t handle what happens in life. He wants your worries. He wants you to have confidence in Him handling it. He assures you He’s listening. If it feels hard, you don’t feel confident, it’s a struggle to trust, the more you pray and bring these worries to Him, the more the worries are defeated and your trust in Him being built. You give the worries to Him.
This is the goal in His Church. This is what His Church, “the household of faith” (Gal 6:10), is for. This is who the Lord’s Supper is for: people who worry more than they trust. We come here, with our worries, to exchange them for trust and faith of the heart. Amen!