Jesus' Four Arguments Against Anxiety
[Message Recap - 5.7.2023]
In our previous post, you heard from someone who has been through finals and is on her final leg of exams about dealing with stress. We hope they were helpful!
This week, we wanted to share Jesus’ Four Arguments Against Anxiety. The end of the year is often a bittersweet time, particularly those facing big transitions like graduation — and with transition also comes anxiety and disorientation. So to help address these feelings, we’re bringing in a stable source of truth: the Bible!
This past Sunday, we finished up our message series on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. This past week, we covered Matthew 6:22-34, which happened to cover anxiety. But before we get there, here are some other nuggets of wisdom about our minds and how to be more self-aware of external things that affect us.
The Eyes (Matt 6:22-23)
Jesus makes a comparison between the eye and a lamp: just as a single lamp affects the entire house, so do our eyes affect our whole bodies. We are highly impacted by the things we see. Our minds are kind of like a blank slate but the images we take in color our minds and how we interpret things (in Josh Wang’s words, we “eye”valuate the world). Oftentimes the things we consume plague us as unwelcome intrusions. If we are at least aware of how what we see on social media or the internet affects our minds, then we can look away and experience being able to see how God sees things and how He wants us to see things.
Serving Two Masters (Matt 6:24)
What is a master? It’s the person in charge; the one who determines your decisions. Jesus specifically points out money and God as two masters. Both are all-consuming and regardless of which one you choose to serve, the other will start looking more threatening. It’s a subtle shift that isn’t noticeable until it’s too late. For example, when we serve money, it ends up dictating your career, where you move, your schedule until before you know it, serving God starts seeming like a threat. That feeling of threat or suspicion though, is a good gauge to discern which one we’re serving.
Four Arguments Against Anxiety (Matt 6:25-34)
And finally, here are Jesus’ arguments against anxiety:
Look outside of your snapshot!
Jesus says, “is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matt 6:26). Jesus asks us to consider life beyond our own experiences. When Jesus says this, he isn’t trying to minimize our anxities or to say that there are bigger things to worry about, but to actually point us to evidences outside of ourselves that demonstrate God not letting His creation flounder. To simply, pause, look around, and rememeber that even the birds of the air are cared for can help get our minds off our own anxieties!
Remember we have a Father in Heaven who loves us
“Are you not of more value than they?” (Matt 6:26)
If God even knows and attends to the needs of a single sparrow, how much more so would he regard His very own image? We were made in the image of God and given special value as God chose to relate with us as His own child. He in fact gave his only son’s life for us. If we have a heavenly father who also happens to have created the world we live in, then what fuels us doesn’t need to be anxiety: we can be fueled by this unchanging reality of our identities.
What use is being anxious?
“And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” (Matt 6:27)
This one’s pretty self -explanatory but the solution comes in His next argument:
Change what you primarily seek
When anxious times come, the way you react is important – to not be crushed by your anxieties and to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matt 6: 33). Along with these words of Jesus, we can look also at Apostle Paul, who had a VERY stressful life, and see how thinking of others helped Him get outside of himself: “And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches” (2 Cor 11:28)
Instead of worrying about tomorrow, worry about today: what do you need to commit to today?
