Article: God Wants You to Replace Your Worries with Trust | Jacob Varghese

Have you ever been losing your sleep? Tossing and turning on your bed! What keeps you awake at night? Are you trying to work out a solution to an issue? I heard from a number of people about losing sleep on finding out a solution to handle the challenges of life and eventually worrying about not getting enough rest even to handle the next day’s work. Is this sound familiar? Troubled relationships and uncertain future, whatever it is we all give in to worry at one point or another in life. These days everybody is worried about something or other. Where will I send my child to college, how can I pay this huge amount of fee, what about my rent payment and there are much serious worries like how am I supposed to deal with the loss of my dear ones, or will this round of treatment finally be last and I will be healed or what am I going to do to get a better job and the list of our worries are endless. In Psalm 4 verse 8 we see the psalmist says “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.” King David was clearly in distress when he penned Psalm 4. In verse 2 we see People were ruining his reputation with groundless accusations. In verse 6 we see some were questioning his competency to rule. David probably felt angry for being treated so unfairly. Surely he could have spent nights worrying about it. Yet we read these remarkable words in verse 8 “In peace I will lie down and sleep”. Charles Spurgeon explains verse 8 beautifully: “in thus lying down David submitted himself into the hands of God; he did so completely and in the absence of all care and worries, he slept and there was a perfect trust.” From the start, David was confident that God would answer his prayers and he was sure that since God had chosen to love him, He would lovingly meet his needs.

In my experience, it seems that all our worry seem to be able to fit into one of the three categories. There is decision worry, there is provision worry and there is lack of vision worry. What I want to do through this short meditation is to give us a few passages of scripture that we can use to come back from these types of worries in our life because I believe that the word of God is the sword of the spirit for a reason because it attacks the lies that enemy tries to get us to in to worry:
Number one is decision worry. Proverbs chapter 3 verses 5 &6 say “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” Decisions are a huge cause of worry in our lives because often times it feels like there are thousands of different options or paths we could take and we cannot really see where any of them lead? So how are we supposed to know which one to choose anyway? But God’s promise in this verse makes it very clear that when we give our decisions up to God and the worry that goes along with them, then He will make the paths straight. He will make the road clear. This is really hard isn’t? Because we want to be in the driver’s seat. We want to be in control, we want to know, we want to understand where we are going. But if we want to defeat worry, we have to replace our need for understanding with trust in God. We have to let God in to the driver’s seat of our life.

Number two is provision worry. In Matthew chapter 6 verses 25 &26 Jesus says this. “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 than food and the body more 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?” I think we worry about provision for one or two reasons. Sometimes it is because we doubt God’s power but the Bible makes it really clear just how powerful God is in Jeremiah chapter 10 verse 12. It says “But God made the earth by his power; he founded the world by his wisdom and stretched out the heavens by his understanding.” The Bible also makes it very clear how God cares for His creation. In the same chapter of Matthew, Jesus talks about how God cares for the sparrow and the flowers. And God also cares for the mountains and valleys, and trees and the animals of the forest. I see the scripture makes it crystal clear that God is all powerful and therefore He is fully capable of caring for His creation. So the second reason we might worry about provision and I think this one is more likely it is because we doubt whether we actually mattered for God. It is not that we doubt whether God is all powerful or not. It is that we doubt that we could actually matter to God who is all powerful. But Jesus speaks directly to this when he asks a probing question when referring to us versus the sparrows. He says are you not much more valuable than they and in the same story in the gospel of Luke chapter 12 verse7 Jesus says “And the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to God than a whole flock of sparrows.” So just get rid of any confusion or any doubt there in your heart. God wants you to know that you matter to Him more than you could ever imagine. We defeat worry when we remember how powerful God is and how much we matter to God.

Number three is lack of vision worry. Later on in Matthew chapter 6 in verse 33 Jesus says “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” You see in life I think we worry about so many unimportant things, only because we lack the vision to see the things that are truly important. God does not want us to worry. Not just because he wants us to trust Him and not just because He wants us to see how much He loves us but because he has something better for us to do. God doesn’t want us to worry about the clothes we are going to wear because I think God is a lot more interested in the ministry we are going to do while wearing them. God doesn’t want us to worry about the food we are going to eat because He is more concerned with what we are going to do with the energy the food gives us. God doesn’t want us to worry about where we are going because God is a lot more interested in what we are going to do when you get there. What God is saying in this verse is instead of always seeking a solution for your worries, give me your worries, seek my kingdom and I will take care of the solution to your problems. What worry does is, it suffocates our calling from God because when we are worried, it is like we are carrying around all this burden or baggage. Then the problem with us is if we are carrying around all these baggage’s, all these burdens, when God finally calls us to do something we are not going to have enough room to take that calling from Him. So instead what God is saying give me your burden, worries and all that baggage so I can replace that with a mission. We defeat worry when we stop seeking solutions and start seeking the kingdom. If worry is gripping you today then God wants to replace it with trust. He wants to let you know how much you matter to Him and He wants to take away that worry so that He can free you to pursue His kingdom calling for your life. May God help us to trust in His power and rest in His presence when worries threaten us. In His sovereign and loving arms, we can lie down and sleep. We can entrust our worries and cares to an absolutely trustworthy God.

JACOB VARGHESE

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