but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

How can God say “do not be anxious”?

One of the most common commands in the Bible is “do not fear” or “do not be anxious” but I wonder how you feel when you read such commands? After all are fear and anxiety a choice? What do I do when I can’t stop being fearful or anxious? Am I sinning? Is God asking the impossible from me?

We are living in days of fear. As one of your ministers, the more of our church family I talk to the more often I hear of fear or anxiety. I started writing this post nearly a week and a half ago. When I started, I began by thinking “this will be a helpful blog post to write for others. I don’t really worry too much about things.” And yet as I’ve tried to write this post I’ve realised that I am somebody who deeply worries about all sorts of different things, from how my newly befriended neighbours will feel about my Easter window to my elderly relatives and their health, from how I divide my time between work and family, to how we are doing as a church family, whether I have offended people, how my friends are coping – etc. etc. etc… and yet, as I’ve been confronted by my own fears and anxieties – it’s been an opportunity to grow in my love of God. I hope the next few paragraphs will help you do the same.

What’s New?

Being surrounded by a culture of fear is actually nothing new. We might be noticing it more at the moment but most of our lives we have lived in a society marked by “an ambience of fear, as well as an air of brash self-confidence”. ¹ Remember how the Scottish independence referendum campaigns or Brexit campaign were fought? They were characterised by fear, fear of losing control to Brussels or Westminster, fear of going it alone or the economic impact. But even in our day-to-day lives we’ve lived in a culture of fear for a long time.

The list of fears is extensive: our pensions, the level of the dollar or euro or sterling (take your pick), whether our children will be able to afford a house or a pay their student loans, terrorism, whether what we have been eating turns out to be carcinogenic, and the list just goes on.

It’s funny how those things seem so small now isn’t it? Coronavirus has put us in new times, that “air of brash self-confidence” has been washed away by an invisible threat we cannot control or predict. For the first time in living memory we are faced with the reality of wide scale death, either our own or that of loved ones. Looking ahead we are met with uncertainty, the like of which we have never known (or perceived) before. And the result? Increased fear, but also perhaps redirected fear? Fear generally comes from finding something that we love being threatened. And because that which we fear generally begins to preoccupy us, we often tend to fixate on the most pressing fears. The things that threaten our greatest loves.

Our emotions point out those things that are more important to us.

Now we need to know that it is not sinful to be concerned about these things, the sin is in thinking God is not concerned. You see when we fear the temptation is to try and protect ourselves. We tend to do this in all sorts of different ways; generally these fall into – action, distraction or despair. Let me ask you, are you trusting in your own protection? Here are some diagnostic questions to help you think about that:

• How is your prayer life? “If you are not praying then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life.” ⁴
• Have you been increasingly selfish, irritable, finding it hard to bear with others?
• Are you struggling to concentrate for a period of time without day dreaming?
• Are you overindulging in TV or obsessing over ‘projects’?
• Are you shrinking back from the world? Disengaging from church, growth group, God?

Is that you? If so, don’t despair, you are currently at a cross roads, you can either run back to trying to protect yourself (how is that working out for you?) or you can grasp something deeper about who God is, know him more intimately and rest in him more fully.

Re-working our fear

Fear is an opportunity to know God more deeply in his provision and love. That was the very reason God gave us the ability to be anxious – “our anxieties are meant to lead us straight to him. Every time.”5 In the Scriptures when God commands us not to fear, it’s not a stinging rebuke, it’s an invitation. Listen to the way in which Jesus commands his disciples not to fear in Luke 12:32:-

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.”

He addresses you as your Shepherd, you can almost hear the love in that phrase “little flock” – and he reassures you with his Fathers heart – “pleased” – and generosity – “to give you the Kingdom”.

In my fears about coronavirus I worry about how I am going to deal with death, grief, illness, financial pressures, the frustration of needy children cooped up here for the next 3 weeks. Jesus wants to lift my eyes from my own efforts to his provision.

This invitation to trust Jesus comes at the end of a passage, well known to many of us, where he invites us to look at nature around us, take a look at the phrases in bold:-

Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?

“Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, 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, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! “

Notice how Jesus takes us to present examples – ravens, wild flowers – to help us deal with the future, see how we talks about what we “will eat.” Our fears today about the future come from knowing that we cannot control it, our best efforts are simply that, efforts. The temptation is to try to gather enough information to feel like we are in control, binge watch the news, follow all the hygiene advice and try to wrestle back some control of the future. And yet many of us were acutely shaken when Boris Johnson went into ITU precisely because we were shown the futility of those efforts. This is not an occasion to master the data, but to trust in God, an occasion to see God’s promise of provision for us.

”The Bible is packed with promises made in history, about the future. From Genesis to revelation the Bible is brimming with hope.”

The big picture of the Bible is one of creation to new creation, the truth that one-day Christ will make all things new and we will be with him forever. But having secured a future for us wonderfully on the cross he also provides for us day by day. 

Enough for today

You might be thinking “this is all good – I get the idea but as I think forward to the future I’m still worried! Worried about how I’m going to cope in the day-to-day struggle of life under coronavirus, worried about how I will cope if things get more difficult. I know God will provide but I’m more worried about how I will cope.”

In the Old Testament after God saved his people out of Egypt he led them to the promised land. It’s a picture that the Bible uses and refers to as it describes our salvation from sin and journey to the promised land of the new creation. During those wilderness days God’s people faced all kinds of hardships. Hardships of enemies and food, prevailing sin and unbelief, hardships of living nomadic lifestyles. In one famous incident in Exodus 16 God’s people are without food, with little prospect of finding food nearby they turn to grumbling. In one sense the worry is completely understandable – there they are with little prospect of future hope and with hungry mouths to feed. Their future looked questionable, and so in miraculous provision God literally rained down bread from heaven each day for them.

Now here’s the interesting thing, they were to gather what they needed for that day. Each day the Lord would give more. But they were not to store it up.⁷ We are told that Gods mercies are new every morning, that his grace is sufficient for us. That grace is sufficient for today. Tomorrow he will give us the grace we require to get through tomorrow. The reason imagining the future is scary is because we are imagining it without the grace to cope with it, we have grace for today. Whatever the future holds God will provide the grace we need for that day too.

Turn fear to Prayer

Now here’s the thing, Jesus is not saying that what we are anxious about is a small thing. He’s not saying that the things we worry about don’t matter. If he was then he wouldn’t be inviting us to greater trust in God. He is saying that, precisely because these things do matter, the only place we can go is to the God who will provide for us. Thats why Paul says “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”⁸ Our fear should lead us to prayer – taking our fears to the one who is in control – which leads us to a peace. Not a peace that comes from facts or figures, knowing the answers or even having a vaccine, but a peace that comes from resting in God’s provision.

So today, as we worry Jesus says to me and to you “you don’t need that anxious bleating my little lamb, come and see again your Fathers provision, know that he will provide for you each day.”

My prayer for you as you read this is that you will come back to that God, remember what he has already done for you in securing the perfect future of heaven and trust him for the grace to endure whatever today holds. You don’t control the future but he does and praise God for that!

¹ Mike Ovey, “Choose Your Fears Carefully!” in The Goldilocks Zone, 92

² Ibid. 93.

³ Ed Welch, Side-by-Side, 24.

⁴ Paul Miller, A Praying Life. 49.

⁵ Groves and Smith, Untangling Emotions, 65.

⁶ Timothy Lane, Living without Worry . 68.

⁷ With the exception of the sabbath.

⁸ Phil 4:6-7

⁹ Paul Miller, The Praying Life. 70.