“Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding.” Proverbs 3:5
Worry does no good and can impact our lives in negative ways. I’m sure you have noticed how absolutely powerless you feel when you worry or feel anxious and troubled, because worry is indeed completely useless. It is a waste of time and energy because it never changes our circumstances. Worry and anxiety do, howeVer, change us. It can make us sick and grouchy. A medical researcher recently told me that 87 percent of all illness is connected to wrong thought patterns. Worry would come under the heading of “negative thinking” and all negative thoughts actually release chemicals from the brain that affect us adversely. In her popular book Who Switched Off My Brain? Dr. Caroline Leaf states that we think thirty thousand thoughts per day and through an uncontrolled thought life, we create conditions that are favorable for illness; we make ourselves sick!
Despite the fact that worrying does us no good and is actually detrimental to our health and well-being, it seems to plague multitude of people, maybe even you. It’s human nature to be concerned about the bad situations in our world and in our personal lives, but if we’re not careful, we can easily become worried or fearful, and we can end up in sin because worrying will keep us from trusting God. Worse than that, by worrying we end up helping the devil in his goal of tormenting us. I find it is easier for me to avoid worry if I keep reminding myself that it is a total waste of time and does absolutely no good at all.
I like to say worry is like sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth; it’s always in motion and it keeps us busy, but it never gets us anywhere. In fact, if we do it to?) long, it wears us out! Worry keeps us from living in faith and steals our peace. When we worry, we are actually saying, “If I try hard enough I can find a solution to my problem,” and that is the opposite of trusting God.
The cause of worry is simple: It’s the failure to trust God to take care of the various situations in our lives. Most of us have spent our lives trying to take care of ourselves, and it takes time to learn how to trust God in every situation. We learn by doing it. We have to step out in faith and as we do we will experience the faithfulness of God, and that makes it easier to trust Him the next time. Too often we trust our own abilities, believing we can figure out how to take care of our own problems. Yet most of the time, after all our worry and effort to go it alone, we come up short, unable ‘to bring about suitable solutions. God, on the other hand, always has solutions for the things that make us anxious and worried.
Trusting Him allows us to enter His rest, and rest is a place of peace where we are able to enjoy life while we are waiting for Him to solve our problems. He cares for us; He wilf solve our problems and meet our needs, but we have to stop thinking and worrying about them. I realize this is easier said than done, but there is no time like the present to begin learning a new way to live-a way of living that is without worry, anxiety, and fear. This is the time to begin thinking and saying, “I trust God completely; there is no need to worry!” The more you think about this truth, the more you will find yourself choosing trust over worry.
what do you worry about most?
How can you release your worry and concern to God?
