Matthew chapter 6, verse 25 to 34, we'll be looking at today. Matthew 6, 25, to the end of the chapter, Jesus says, Therefore I tell you, Do not be anxious 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. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you, by being anxious, can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Let's pray that prayer, we pray. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight. Oh, Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Well, it is good to be back with you all. We just returned from a couple weeks of baking in the New Jersey sun. Not that you could ever tell by looking at my lovely Irish bride, who's as pale as ever. Some of you know we spend at least one of our weeks down there at a home where I do a chaplaincy every summer. And I figured this year I'm going to hit the easy button. So I re-preached to them my sermons on the Beatitudes. But there was a catch. I had to cram them into less than 10 minutes, closer to five if I could. Phil would have loved this. As it turns out, I could say everything I say up here in a fraction of the time is what I've learned. And the funny thing is they were asking for more, and I think many of you would be happy to settle for less. So there's no accounting for taste. Anyway, that's the longest vacation I've ever taken. And I was grateful for it. Cape May is the only nice thing New Jersey has, so it is a blessing to go. But there's a funny thing. that happens to me on vacation, and maybe you can relate to this. I came home more stressed than relaxed. And have you ever felt that way? Maybe. People sometimes say they need a vacation to recover from their vacation, and I felt like that a little bit. And it turns out that stress and anxiety tend to follow me. wherever I go, including on vacation. And sometimes it even gets worse in some ways. And if I'm not careful, anxiety and stress will ruin my vacation, or at least significant parts of it. So as it turns out, my anxiety levels have nothing to do with where I am, or work, or anything like that. It's just that I'm an anxious person everywhere. Of course, I know that. I'm a chronic nail biter, and I fidget a lot. I have a lot of issues, OK? You guys know that. I worry about all kinds of things, you know? And I even worry about how I relax. I worry about whether everyone is having fun and I worry about not missing out on anything and falling behind on things at home and not getting enough reading done while I was away and this kind of thing. And since getting home, I've not been much better. I literally woke up yesterday hours ahead of my alarm worrying about this message. I do this most weeks. Anxiety is clearly an issue for me. So how fitting and ironic that Jesus addresses anxiety today. I really have nothing to offer by way of example in a positive way of myself this week. I can't exactly preach this passage as one who has it figured out, but I'm assuming I'm in good company. How many of you deal with anxiety and worry? Okay, and the rest of you are lying. I know, it's okay. We're not alone. The CDC claims that roughly 20% of all Americans are dealing with some form of anxiety disorder. It was already high. COVID made it worse. Suicide rates are up. And that's just the diagnosable stuff, right? Even if you don't have a disorder, quote unquote, all of us deal with worry and anxiety and stress. And Jesus knows that people worry. and that we have anxiety issues, and he has some thoughts about that. Jesus does not want us to worry. He commands us not to, which means that anxiety, as Jesus means it, is actually a form of disobedience. Now we're not talking about clinical depression. I don't think that's what Jesus is getting about. That's a topic for another time. But the anxiety Jesus is talking about isn't just a feeling or something that you can't help or a chemical imbalance or that kind of thing. We can't always help that kind of stuff. But what we often do is we take a thing that's on our mind and that's bothering us and that has us upset and we get on an endless hamster wheel. of thoughts and fretting and hand-wringing over stuff that we really can't control. This is the stuff that keeps us up at night. By definition, at a time we couldn't control it, even if it was within our grasp. What are you going to do about it at two in the morning, right? The dictionary definition of worry is to give way to anxiety or allow your mind to dwell on some trouble or another. So worry, in that sense, is actually kind of a decision, in other words. when you're staying up and rehashing some idea and some problem or thinking about something stupid that you did or whatever. That's a compulsive behavior. That's something that you do have at least some control over in theory. But Jesus tells us not to worry. But he also explains why we worry and also why we shouldn't. In other words, he gives reasons. He doesn't give it as an arbitrary command. He explains exactly why anxiety is not only wrong but silly and why, in a sense, anxiety is always a form of a disorder. It's something disordered in the way you're thinking about it. The text revolves around this command. That's not a suggestion. Jesus says, do not be anxious. The ESV says anxious. Many other translations say, do not worry. I kind of like the King James Version where it says, take no thought. Don't even think about it. The Greek verb there is merimnao. You're not going to have to write that down or anything, but it carries the sense of being divided. That's sort of the literal meaning. It's being drawn in opposite directions or distracted. It means you're preoccupied, in other words, is how we might put it, that you can't focus. And that's an interesting point because George observed to me this week, you know, when we are worried about something, when something is worrying us, we tend to think that we're actually intensely focused on that one thing that we're worrying about. But the Greek sense of the word seems to imply that we're actually being distracted by that. That our focus is being diverted away from one thing toward this thing that worries us. We're taking our eye off the ball, in other words. That's what anxiety does. And maybe that makes sense of the King James translation that Jesus is basically saying, stop thinking about that. Give it no thought. Of course, we all know this is easier said than done. Before I went away, we were talking about hoarding treasures in heaven and not on earth, if you recall. And it's probably worth doubling back to that just briefly because you'll notice that Jesus starts this passage with a therefore, right? meaning the thoughts are connected, and it's connected because hoarding treasure on earth is a major driver of worry for us. And that's obvious in how we worry about money and material goods, but it occurred to me later on that this is not limited to stuff, but also experiences, things that we want to see and do in our lives before we die. I can relate to this because nobody suffers from FOMO more than I do, the fear of missing out. It's part of why I can't sleep some nights, because somebody might be having fun somewhere without me, kind of thing. But in that context, it occurred to me that even bucket lists are evidence of earthly hoarding. We create bucket lists because we're not convinced there's any satisfaction in the hereafter, so we naturally obsess with experiencing everything here before we die. We have to see and taste and hear and touch everything possible before it's too late. And hoarding these things, hoarding these earthly, material, experiential things, this produces anxiety. And that's why Jesus pivots to this question of worry and anxiety directly off of that. But it's worth noticing that he doesn't stick with talking about money. He had ended that last passage talking about money. But we all know that money is only a vehicle to get other things. We discussed that before. In and of itself, money has no value. Most of us are not like Scrooge McDuck swimming in our money for fun, right? We don't take that much joy in it. One of my favorite scenes from Spongebob is when Mr. Krabs gets his arm stuck in the sink trying to grab a dime that was falling down there. And Spongebob says, you'll have to let go of the dime. And he says, boy, I can give you 10 good reasons never to let go of a dime. Some weirdos are like me, I'm a coin collector, so I collect them for their rare dates and the mint marks, and I can talk about why the peace dollar is probably the most beautiful dollar and coin that was ever minted in American history, and it's like, nobody cares, right? But I'm weird like that, right? Scrooge McDuck, Mr. Krabs, and me, we're just caricatures of what it means to love money. Most normal people love money for what it can buy. And that's why Jesus pivots directly from the money to the heart of the worry and anxiety. We serve the money because we're worried about other things. He says, therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious 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? For some reason this brought to mind the song, I don't know how many of you know the band 21 Pilots. I think they're awful but some people are into them I guess. They have this song called Stressed Out that was really popular and you hear it even on secular stations and this kind of thing and they say we're all stressed out and in essence they blame the whole thing on money and the fact that being a grown up means that they have to get a job now. typical angsty millennial tune that's very fitting for our generation. My point is that Jesus would disagree with this analysis. He's saying that what stresses us out is not the money per se. Serving the money is sinful and stressful, yes, but why do we serve the money? It's because we're worried about other things. What stresses us out, the reason that we end up serving money is because we're worried about actual practical things that we need and that money could buy. When I quoted George Bailey some weeks back, he was right in a sense when he said to Clarence the angel, the money does come in pretty handy down here. The money's not what we're actually worried about. It's that it's useful for getting certain things. So what are we actually worried about? Well, Jesus, he starts by looking at two broad categories. And he talks about our life and our body. In other words, he's saying we worry about survival and we worry about comfort and our appearance. He mentions explicitly bread, water, and clothing, but those are just examples in a way that he's throwing out there. This obviously extends to everything that sustains us, really. The roof over our head, having a functioning car, heat in the winter, a job, your health. We worry about very practical things a lot of the time. You know, what politicians would call kitchen table issues, right? Things that we actually have to deal with. And in that sense, you would think, like, oh, well, our anxiety is not completely irrational. We need these things. Now, it's also fair to point out that we also stress out about a lot of stupid things, don't we? Like how the Phillies are doing. Or getting to church late. Or losing our keys. or leaving the van double parked outside and forgetting about it like I did. But it's interesting to me that that's not where Jesus goes, is it? He doesn't say, don't sweat the small stuff, right? Don't worry about stupid things. No, Jesus says, don't worry about the important stuff. Don't stress out over the necessary things. Strange. But why? He says, because your life and your body are more than food and clothing. In other words, you're more than the sum of your parts. You are not defined by your needs. That's an interesting take and kind of countercultural, isn't it? Because our culture tends to think of people as exactly being defined by their needs. We are thought of as consumers and we're defined by what we consume. You're not a person who smokes, you're a smoker. You're not a person who has a gluten allergy, you are gluten free. It's your identity. We define people by their needs. People with certain disabilities, we'll call them special needs. That's your identity, right? And in today's navel-gazing culture, where nearly everybody can be diagnosed with something, we tend to label all people by these various, very individual-specific needs. That becomes your identity. It's one reason I hate Myers-Briggs much to Pat and David's chagrin. I don't want to be identified by my many isms and tendencies. I would rather just be me with a bunch of stupid habits. But politicians and social scientists and advertisers and at times even religious leaders tend to look at people as a bunch of needs to be met. Mouths to be fed, right? And this starts right from birth. I can testify that every time Georgia and I had another kid, somebody would make a comment about how having kids is expensive. In other words, they think, you know, think of all that kid's going to consume in their lifetime, all the diapers, the food, teenage boys, sports camps, tuition, all those weddings for all those girls. Six kids, God bless you, that's going to be expensive. I've heard this speech so many times. But my point is the culture has reduced children and people generally to what they consume and they will be treated that way throughout their lives. And implicit in that attitude is that children are not only a burden, but kind of having them at all is kind of irresponsible. And it's funny because I think, ironically, we live in a culture that obsesses over self-esteem, right? And valuing yourself and self-care and this kind of thing, right? But simultaneously with that, we devalue human life and reduce mankind to a carbon footprint. Life, according to the culture, is a burden on the planet and on society. Like, no wonder people are confused. But Jesus says, no, you are more than that. You're not a random collection of atoms. You are not defined by what you consume or even what you need. There is more to you than food and clothing. And Jesus explains this using two illustrations about birds and grass, not to be confused with the birds and the bees, right? Verse 26, he says, look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. And are you not of more value than they? And which of you, by being anxious, can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the fields, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. I don't need to go into deep analysis on these ones because these illustrations are not hard to understand, are they? Maybe hard to apply, but they're not hard to understand. They're designed to demonstrate how silly most of our worrying is. Jesus is using arguments from nature to demonstrate that God is sovereign and provides. He does this constantly. It's in his character. And he first points to the birds. And he rightly observes that birds do absolutely no prep work for their food. They don't think about next season or plan tomorrow's meals or anything like that. They just kind of wake up and go. Kind of lazy on their part, isn't it, when you think about it? But they get by. Now, I'm fond of birds. So I actually do feed them. They kind of have a storehouse, like a barn almost, of seeds out there, a picnic table for me. And I write most of my sermons out there at that picnic table so I can watch them. But it's a funny thing. I went away for two weeks, right? And the feeder was empty all that time. They all survived somehow, you know? Amazing. In fact, I'm having a hard time getting them back now. because they've already moved on because my restaurant was closed and they just figured, well, whatever, we'll figure it out on our own. Point being, they don't need me. God feeds them and I don't have to. I'm only doing it for kicks and giggles. And you see this throughout nature, right? You see this in all elements of the food chain, you know? We were at the beach the one day, we had a disgusting bloom of something called saps. We had to look them up, but there were millions of them in the water, and they looked like mini jellyfish eggs, like really creepy. They were getting in people's hair and everything else, and everybody was like freaking out, you know? You have to look it up and it turns out they are all part of the chain, right? They eat the phytoplankton and then when the phytoplankton reproduces, it produces most of the world's oxygen. And then the fish eat the salps and then the dolphins patrol the coast and eat the fish. That includes the jellyfish so that they won't sting you. It's glorious. God's got all this stuff worked out. You don't need to feed the birds or even the alley cats. They'll figure it out. And even if they don't, God's sovereign over that too. The point is that it's all in God's hands. And then Jesus turns to the grass and he points out the beauty of the wildflowers. And you start to realize that his earlier comment on clothing is not about just clothing as a necessity to keep you warm. He's making the case that God knows something about beauty too. He's not satisfied to simply provide sustenance. He not only feeds his creatures, he does it in style. Even for the kindling that you use for your oven. And his point is not that just beautiful flowers exist somewhere. He's not talking about a cultivated garden. Those are beautiful. We all know that. His point is that God makes even like an overgrown parking lot beautiful, in a sense, if you let it go long enough. If you look up close, the most neglected yard in the world will eventually produce some flowers. And they will be prettier and more intricate than most of your clothes. Jesus is saying that we can deduce from creation that God not only cares that your belly is filled, but that you look halfway respectable in the process. Nature teaches you that God cares about sustenance and beauty. He provides the bare bones essentials, but also the extras. All of creation points to a God who provides. He provides food and beauty, existence and extravagance, basically everything that makes life possible and worth living. Now, you may say that, well, that's all great if you have food and clothing, but if you don't have your health, you don't have anything, right? But Jesus addresses that too, at least in this translation of it where he says, you know, anxiety is not going to add a single hour to your life. That's not a promise of good health, but it's a pretty obvious truth that if you're going to get sick or die, worrying is not going to change that. And in fact, worry is counterproductive. You don't need a doctor to know that stress is a killer. The relationship between stress and higher mortality is confirmed by every study you can look up, but personal experience will tell you, too. You all know that a week spent in worry is not good for your health. Now, Jesus switches gears a little bit. He makes another argument, starting in verse 31, and he adds another command to what he's already been saying. He says, therefore, do not be anxious. saying, what shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." That's a slightly new line of argument there. Basically, what he's saying is that it's a very human thing to worry. That's why he mentions the Gentiles. You know, that's shorthand for all the unbelievers, right? He's basically saying, look, everybody worries. That doesn't make you unique. But his argument is that we should look different from the world. If we spend every waking moment worried about basic things, we'll be no different from the world around us. And Jesus wants you to be different. We're not supposed to sit around wringing our hands like the world does. In other words, if the world spends every day talking about inflation and how society is falling apart and how the world is getting worse and how this country is falling apart and oh, woe is us, we don't have to chime in. That shouldn't be the Christian's gut response. The goal is not to fit in with them. He doesn't expect us to stand at the water cooler or go on social media complaining about how bad things have gotten because that's what everybody's complaining about. The world is constantly scrambling to make ends meet and to go get theirs. You are not to imitate them. What sets you apart is that you have a heavenly father. What sets the Christian apart is a supreme confidence that your father will provide because that's what he does. A child of God should never live in despair the way the world does. And again, Jesus doesn't downplay our needs. He doesn't say, who cares about food and clothes, guys? No, his argument is not that they're not important, but that they're so important that, of course, your father already knows. That's a given. When you pray for your daily bread, you're asking your father for something so basic. It's not news to him that you need it. He likes to hear you say that, but it's not news to him. One of the most annoying habits of the ancient Israelites was when they were rescued out of Egypt, how often they would complain to Moses, like, what, did God lead us out here just to starve us in the wilderness? Like, as if he didn't know that they needed another meal? If anxiety is a form of distraction, Jesus makes clear here what we should be focused on. He says it's the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And I wanted you to notice that it's not your righteousness, but his. In other words, this is not a call to replace worry with legalism and you getting yourself righteous, right? Jesus is calling you to fix your eyes on the righteous heavenly father and lead others to do the same. There's an evangelistic angle to this. If we really believe that God is our father, as Jesus has been saying, there should be no room for anxiety because a righteous father would not abandon his children. One of the clearest ways to tell the world that you are a child of God and a citizen of his kingdom is to live like you expect him to provide your daily bread. You pray the Lord's prayer with expectation that he will deliver because he loves you. Now Jesus makes a final point with a final therefore here in verse 34. He says, Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. At a glance, this can sound like Jesus is backtracking and allowing you to worry at least some of the time about today, right, as long as you focus on the near term. I don't think that's quite what he means here. But he is recognizing that a lot of what people worry about, a lot of what drives our worry is not what is actually happening, but what might happen. In other words, we worry about what we can't see. We fear the unknown. Now, I have a confession. Every year of my life, pretty much, we have been going to Knoebel's Amusement Park in Elysburg, PA. It's a wonderful place. Over 30 years it's been, right? They have a famous haunted house there. It's one of the best in the nation. But for the first 10 years that we went to Knoebel's, I never once opened my eyes on that ride. I wrote it every year as a rite of passage, but I was too afraid to open my eyes. I was a young teenager and still holding people's hands to go through this thing. I couldn't handle it. Too many surprises. I couldn't handle the pressure. I'm a weenie. Now I enjoy it, but you know why? Because I've memorized it. I know where every ghoul and goblin is hiding, and I'm not gonna tell you about any of them, because you should go and experience it yourself, but it's a much easier ride to handle now. Unfortunately, life is not like that. We can't predict anything, and every new day brings potential tragedies. And so we focus most of our anxiety on the uncertainties of the future. But Jesus says, you can't tackle tomorrow's problems today. We have to take life one day at a time. Otherwise, we'll ruin every day by worrying about the next. He says, each day's trouble is sufficient for you. It's just enough. Believe it or not, it is sufficient for you to focus on getting home, putting dinner on the table, getting the kids ready for bed, your teeth brushed, and your prayers said. That's sufficient. Embrace that. He doesn't expect you to fix everything today, and if you try to, you will burn yourself out. My older girls used to sing a song, one of them made up. We're not really sure how this came about, but he says, tomorrow, today. That was pretty much the extent of the song that we can remember. Georgia and I have joked for years that that sounds like either an advertising jingle for some futuristic artificial intelligence company or something like that, or it could just be a motto for how I live. This week I was so stressed coming in from vacation, I was stressed about the stuff that had happened there but then I get here and I'm looking at the calendar and I'm looking at the next month and everything else and I'm realizing like we've been in vacation mode and it's like I don't even remember where we fit. Sunday school, third Sunday, fire night. Bible study, like a running list of things that we need to cram back into the calendar, right? And I worried myself into a frenzy over this whole thing, up to and including the fact that I looked ahead and saw that Christmas is on a Sunday. I lost sleep over these things this week. I think it's fair to say that Jesus would tell me that December should worry about itself. but I'm an anxious person, so I do let tomorrow's worries ruin today. So we see that worry and stress and anxiety is not only useless, it's destructive. Jesus says not to worry about our life or our body or our health or our future, so why are we all so stressed out, even in the church? I don't know, maybe some of you feel like you have this stress thing figured out. I would welcome your counsel if you have. But I just can't seem to stop worrying about things. I worry a lot. I don't really fear starvation or anything or going without clothes, but I do worry about making ends meet sometimes and being able to enjoy my current standard of living. And I worry about keeping up with the Joneses And I've realized over time, I am increasingly, I worry about my health. Nothing's even happened, but I worry about it anyway. I've seen enough illness in others that I have phobias about how I will die one day. I worry about the future, and I fear pain, and I fear failure. As a husband and father, as a pastor of this church, I worry about the future of my children. I worry about the future of my country and my city. I worry about my sin. And I can sit up rehashing and replaying my stupidity in my head again and again. All of these things cause significant anxiety. I'm an anxious man living a very anxious existence a lot of the time. Why? I think the short answer is I'm not believing what Jesus says here. Jesus says that we should not worry because we're not identified by our needs, we're not just a collection of atoms, that we have value more than the birds and the grass or anything in creation, and moreover, worrying's not gonna help you anyway, it can't fix tomorrow. Jesus says, focus on the kingdom, evangelize your neighbors. And he says this because our Father already knows what we need and he'll take care of it, and I, I live like I don't believe it. My life does not always match my professed belief that God is my father. I live like I'm an orphan. That line in verse 30 feels like it's written for me when Jesus says, oh you of little faith. Oh me of little faith. Matt of little faith does not really believe that my father will take care of this stuff because I don't really believe that he sees me or that he knows what I need and so I take it all on my shoulders and I end up hunched over and bent with the burden. So tell me, is it any wonder if my Christian witness and testimony is weak? Or why I struggle evangelizing my neighbors? I'm too busy worrying about my needs and wants to focus on the kingdom. It's not every moment, but it's true enough of the time. George will testify to it. And I wonder if many of you could tell the same story. Some of you know the hymn, His Eye is on the Sparrow. And it's funny, I watch my bird feeder all day, and it's the sparrows who frustrate me the most. Because they make a mess. And they don't so much eat as they tear the feeder apart. They're pickier than my kids, you know, sparrows. I filled the thing with sunflower seeds, which aren't their favorite. I did that intentionally, but they come anyway and they just throw the seeds around. And it makes me mad. But you know, in a sense, maybe they just have more faith in me in a way, you know, because they know they don't need my food. The father will feed them so they can afford to be picky and reject my offerings. I'm sure some worry is more legitimate than others, but I think it's fair to say that most of what we worry about is, in fact, sinful, and moreover, it's exhausting. When we let our anxiety control us, we are advertising to the world around us that we don't really believe that our father is good or that he will provide for our needs, that he doesn't care about our lives or our bodies or our future, and if that's how we act, We cannot be surprised if the unbelievers that we know are not eager to sign up. Some kingdom if it can't feed its citizens, right? Some father if he won't provide for his children. Well, if you're a worrier like me, there's hope for us. All is not lost. Jesus is not surprised by your worry. He expected it. That's why he takes the time to talk about it. We worry because our faith is small and we think to ourselves, how can Jesus give this as a command? How can he do that? Doesn't God realize what I'm going through? And Jesus says, yes, he does know. Because once again, the key to this lesson is that God is your father. He knows exactly what you're going through and exactly what you need. And even when our anxiety overwhelms us, God is not worried. He is not anxious. Your father is not losing sleep over your problems. He will provide. The most embarrassing thing about this command is how often he has to keep proving it to you. I told you, I stress out week after week writing sermons and doing everything else. And somehow he gets me through every day and it's just like, oh, wow, another miracle kind of thing. And then I worry all over again, the exact same pattern every week. The psalmist says that you shouldn't eat the bread of anxious toil. Georgia often cites that verse to me. How often has she told me, read that verse, recited it to me, and told me, go to bed. He grants his beloved sleep. And I'm like, I have too much to worry about. And I resist it every time. But the point of this passage is not to crush you. It's quite the opposite. What Jesus wants you to see is that your anxiety, he wants you to see it for what it really is. It's almost comically silly how small our faith is. I hate to say it, but I think Jesus kind of wants us to let go and let God. I don't like using cliches. He says, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And again, it's your righteousness, his righteousness, not your righteousness, it's his righteousness, right? If the answer to anxiety is your personal righteousness, that's a recipe for more anxiety. The answer to our sinful stress and anxiety is his righteousness. The answer to your stress is the cross of Calvary and the one who bore a burden that you can't begin to fathom. Sin causes anxiety and anxiety is itself sinful, but Jesus died for all of that. and he wants you, he commands you to release your anxiety to him. Maybe the real key to the puzzle is what you find in Matthew 11, just a short while after this sermon, one of the greatest promises in all of scripture, when Jesus says, come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I'm gentle and lowly in heart, and you'll find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. So you may not be able to forget your troubles, but you can consciously surrender them to Jesus and get off the hamster wheel of worry. Your anxiety might be real and it may be exhausting, but it's not yours to carry. That's what Jesus means. So give it to one who can bear it. Stop being distracted. Fix your eyes on the righteous King and let him give you rest. Let's pray. Gracious God and Father, I don't know why you have the sense of humor to put me in a place to have to speak on stress and anxiety. Lord, I have nothing to offer, but Jesus does. Lord, we are a people who are often burdened with worries. you knew we would be. We thank you that your son is all fit to address that here in this sermon. But Lord, we pray that you would teach us, train us, to take the burdens, the things that we carry, the things that we rehash, and the hamster wheel items that we just can't stop thinking about and worrying about, Lord, and to put them at your feet. Not that we'll be able to forget them. Help us and teach us to give it to Jesus. Who can bear these things when we cannot? We pray that you would help us to do that this week. Be glorified in us, we pray, in Jesus' name. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Please stand and join me in singing the doxology. Praise God from whom all Blessings flow. Praise Him, all creatures. Hear me. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.