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Welcome to Gospel and Life. During January, we're inviting our listeners to consider becoming a Gospel and Life monthly partner. Monthly partners are an important part in helping us to plan for how we can be the most effective in reaching people all over the world with the Gospel. If you'd like to become a monthly partner, just visit gospelandlife.com partner that's gospelandlife.com partner what is holding you back from truly trusting in from not just believing in his existence, but letting the power of His Word change how you approach daily life, work and relationships. In today's message, Tim Keller looks at one of Jesus most well known teachings to explain how true faith begins when we stop trying to control our own lives and start trusting in the God who knows exactly what we need.
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Matthew 6:25 34 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? Look 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? Who of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to his life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If 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? So do not worry, saying, what shall we eat? Or what shall we drink? Or what shall we wear? For the pagans run after these things, and your Heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Somebody this is a Presbyterian church. I heard somebody ready to say Amen. We're looking at the Sermon on the Mount and today we come to Jesus. Command not to be anxious. Three times he says, don't be anxious. A quick question that comes up how can somebody how does anybody have the audacity to command us not to be anxious? Who wants to be anxious? Nobody gets up in the morning and says, I'm going to really be anxious today. I can't wait. You know, it's not a very voluntary thing. So why would Jesus command us if we look carefully, we'll see that he's not commanding us in a kind of drill sergeant way. There's a friend of mine, a pastor friend of mine, who was poking fun at himself. He's in his 50s now, but when they first got married, he and his wife in their early 20s, he was saying that she went into a depression. And he used all of his every bit of skill he could to get her out of it. He says, I tried everything, Everything. Every single morning I went into her and I said, buck up. But nothing helped. He says, she was incorrigible. Jesus is not coming to us today and saying, buck up. You know, what are you being anxious for? Cut it out. You know, stop it. Whistle a happy tune. He doesn't do anything like that. Instead, if you look carefully, you'll see that he gets underneath. And he explains to us the why and he reasons with us. There's a sense in which he. He does surgery and he says, anxiety is wrong. And if you sit still and let me do my surgery in you, if you listen to my instructions, I can get it out of you. I can remove it. So there is an obedience. But at the same time, there's definitely a sense here that Jesus says, I'm going to show you how to get underneath the surface and how you can let me get underneath the surface and deal with anxiety three times. Don't be anxious. Jesus says, now, what's anxiety? First question, what is it? Good question. It's actually easier to describe than to define. There's a Time magazine not too long ago said it's the most prevailing quality of our modern culture. And I think the reason for that is anxiety is more than a psychological thing. It's got a psychological and a physical and a philosophical aspect. See, psychologically, anxiety, of course, can either be focused on a specific danger, but anxiety can be a debilitating general condition that is not really focused on any particular cause. And that is the best way to describe it. It's like having a constant Jaws theme, bass note, line going through your life. You know, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. You're looking around for the fin, you're sure something's going wrong. It's called neurotic. You know, it's a frightening thing. And it really can characterize our whole lives psychologically. But more than that, anxiety also is a physical aspect. Physically, anxiety is called stress. We know this. We know that our bodies have an autonomic nervous system so that when there's a danger, our bodies can suddenly get actually triggered. That system gets Triggered by the anxiety, by the danger. And we begin to pump adrenaline and begin to pump in all kinds of other things. That gets us ready for what's called the fight or flight. We're ready for dramatic, drastic action. So when danger appears, our body has a way of getting itself ready to do something. But if you find that you're constantly living with stress, that every day, day in and day out, you're constantly living with perceived dangers, financial dangers and professional dangers and relationship dangers, you find that your body is always in that condition. And your body's not supposed to be like that. The system's not supposed to be going off every day. And eventually you literally burn up. You burn out, and ulcers and hypertension and high blood pressure as a result. But anxiety even has a philosophical aspect. You know, Heidegger and the German existentialists talked about angst, but they also talked about my favorite word, geworfenheit, the thrown ness, a feeling of being thrown into the world. No rhyme or reason to things. And when you read an article about last Christmas about a little boy in the Bronx sitting at table on Christmas Eve and a stray bullet just coming, tearing up through the ceiling, up through the floor, tearing up through the wall, tearing right into the room, hitting him in the head and killing him right at the table. And when you read stories like that, and if you look for them, they're in the New York Times every day, you begin to feel that Geworfenheit, the anxiety that's even more philosophical than psychological, a sense that there's no rhyme or reason to things. It can be so. Prevailing anxiety can and does infect every part of our lives, body, soul and spirit, interlocking. But what is it? And I think when Jesus says, don't worry about tomorrow, at the very end of the passage, he's summing up everything else. He said, worry is concern about the potential, not the actual worry is concern about that which we can't control, anxiety. The essence of anxiety is the desire to control that which we can't control. That's why we're anxious. We feel the need for control. In an area where there's no possibility of control, that causes anxiety. Now, that's what it is. Anxiety is the will to control the uncontrollable. Secondly, if that's what it is, where does it come from? And the Bible, as usual, gives us far and away the most coherent answer. Jesus Christ is, if you look carefully, you'll see that in a very gentle way, he is saying the source of Anxiety is the human will to power. The fact is that we want the power that God's got, and anxiety comes from that. He says. For example, he says, who, by being anxious, can add one minute to your life? But that's the point we want to add. We want the power God has. And Jesus is saying, isn't life more than food and drink? And who, by worrying, can add one minute to your life? What he's saying is, listen, who's been keeping your life going all these years anyway? What are you worried about it now for? Put it this way, he says, when the doctor comes in with bad news, when the boss comes in with bad news, suddenly we get anxious because we feel like we're out of control. But it's the threat that reveals the illusion that we've been living at living on all these years. The illusion is we felt up to now that we were in control. We're getting anxious because we feel like we're getting out of control. That's not true. The threat is revealing your true condition. You've always been out of control. You've always been vulnerable. You've never been keeping your life going. And you see danger, which triggers anxiety. The anxiety is essentially showing us not a new precarious condition, but at the deepest level. That's where. That's where Heidegger comes in with his Geworfenheit. At the deepest level, it's showing us what we knew all along. We've never been in charge. We're not in control. And Jesus says that we're anxious because we disbelieve and dislike the fact that we're totally dependent on the supporting power of God. We don't like it and we are afraid of it. And that's what the anxiety is. Biblically, though, there's a wonderful truth underneath all this. Pascal, the Christian philosopher, has a very interesting statement. The great thing about Christianity is even when it's telling you what's wrong with you, it tells it to you in such a positive way because it shows you. It shows you where it's from. Pascal puts it like this, he says, not on page three, but on page two. He says, the greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For who is unhappy at not being a king but a deposed king? Now you know what he's saying. The Bible says the reason we're anxious is because we need to be in control. But the reason we want to be in control is we were made originally to be kings and queens on earth. The Bible tells us that we were built to be stewards. Now, a steward was the number one slave in a great mansion. The steward was the slave with authority. A steward was a slave toward the master, but toward everyone else, he was a king. And when a steward is a slave toward his master, dependent, loving, obedient, he grows in his authority. That's the kind of king we were built to be. The Bible tells us, though, in the book of Genesis, that we didn't like being in charge of everything except God. We wanted to be in charge of everything. We wanted to be our own masters. And trying to become more than human, we became less. And trying to become more than ourselves, we became less than ourselves. And today, how do we respond to this need for control which comes from the fact we were built to be kings, the fact that we were built for glory? We respond now the way we responded then. We're no different than Adam and Eve. We respond now the way we responded then. We try to get more power and more control. And the more we try to get power and control and be our own masters, the less powerful we feel. And so Reinhold Niebuhr, the man who taught at Union Seminary for years, has a fascinating statement about the relationship of theology to psychology. He says the schools of modern psychology, which regard the will to power as the most dominant of human motives, has not yet recognized how basically it's related to insecurity, anxiety. The human ego does not feel secure and therefore grasps for more power in order to make itself secure. It does not regard itself as sufficiently significant or respected and seeks to enhance its position. Did you hear that? We're insecure because we want power. And the more we want power, the more we seek to control our lives, the more we resent the fact that God's actually in control of our lives, the more insecure we get. Anxiety comes from that will to power. That's why Luther looked at Melanchthon, his friend Philip Melanchthon one day, who was worried, full of anxiety about how things were going. And instead of Luther saying, buck up, he did surgery. He went underneath and said to Philip, he says, let Philip cease to rule the world. You know why you're anxious, Philip? You want to be in charge. You're trying to be in charge. Let Philip cease to rule the world. We have to assert ourselves. Anxiety comes when we do. What's anxiety? The need for control of the uncontrollable. Where does it come from? Our basic essential nature as kings and queens, which we are trying to express by Being masters of our own lives when we're not. Then number three, well, then, what do we do about it? And you say, this is wonderful. This is very interesting. It makes me feel very interested. But what do I do? And again, Jesus would never just say, buck up. He tells you what to do. And essentially in this passage he says, if you're full of anxiety, psychological, physical, philosophical, whatever, there are two things you're doing wrong. And therefore, if you want to remove the anxiety from your life, there's two things you've got to do right. The two things you're doing wrong is wrong thinking and wrong priorities. Wrong thinking and wrong priorities. Here's what we mean. Number one, wrong thinking. Again and again, he says in the old King James, he says, consider the birds of the air. Consider the lilies of the field. Now, in our modern translations of the one that I just wrote or just read, didn't write it. I'd be a rich man if I wrote. Just says, look at. It says, see the birds of the air. It says, look at the grass of the field. That's not nearly as good a word, because the word that's used there is a word that means ponder and think. Jesus says, if you're anxious, you're not thinking. He says, do not be anxious, but consider this, consider that. Now listen, before I even move on. Do you see how critical that is? What do you think faith is? Do you think faith is an absence of thinking? Do you think faith is just closing your eyes and jumping? Do you think faith says, well, it doesn't make any sense, but it doesn't matter. That's where faith comes in. Is that how Jesus talks? No way. Jesus says faith is thinking. He says it's anxiety. That's the absence of thinking. Anxiety and fear and distress. You see, when you're sitting and listening to your heart run off at the mouth. That's what makes you scared. When your heart starts to ramble, it starts to just react to situations. See, it runs at the mouth the way you do and I do. If you don't think before you speak. So you're laying in bed and the heart's just saying, oh, how bad it's going to be. And oh, how awful it's going to be. And what am I going to do about this? You're listening to your heart instead of talking to your heart. Listening to your heart is what Jesus says brings the anxiety. Instead, you sit down with your heart and say, wait. Look at the facts. Consider this, consider that. You argue, you talk. What do you think Faith is friends. Faith is not passing peaceful thoughts through your mind, and faith is not turning your mind off. Faith is a position of confidence toward the world based on what God has said in His Word.