On Sunday in my sermon I mentioned that the way of life that Jesus calls us to follow involves a deep trust in God, which means that we need to confront our tendency to worry. This was the topic that prompted the most comments by people afterwards, because worrying is such a common thing for so many of us. Again last night I woke up at 4am thinking about what I had to do in the coming week. It can be a terribly hard habit to shake – and often we do have serious things on our mind that are worth worrying about!

In Matthew 6, as we saw, Jesus urges us to combat our worries with the remembrance of God’s character. God the Father sustains the universe and gives life to everything in it, and so our concerns are not outside his care. Once we lay the foundation of that trust, then we might have a basis on which to address our worried thoughts and feelings. I’ve heard a helpful analogy to this. In Psalm 125 the writer says ‘Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever.’  The clouds and the rain come and go over the mountain, but underneath it the mountain is unshakeable. In the same way, underneath our distracted thoughts and worries is the unshakeable goodness of God and our connection to him, which can’t be taken away from us no matter what happens.

-Andrew-