Answering AnxietySample

The Answer to Anxiety Accepts God’s Providences

What does humility look like in action? Humility submits to God’s providences.

When people are suffering, they are often tempted to be filled with anxiety. Like the writer of Psalm 42, they are facing troubles, and their hearts become cast down within them.

The mighty hand of God is a sovereign hand – a powerful and ruling hand. Do you believe God is sovereign? Do you believe your current circumstances reflect God’s plan, that God has you in the place where you are right now? Will you humble yourself right there, or will you – trying to take care of yourself – fight in every direction to escape your present situation?

This is not to say that you can’t try to improve your situation if the Lord allows it, but the real issue is not your circumstances. The issue is, will you trust the Lord? Are you going to despair if circumstances don’t change, or will you have joy? 

The real issue is the change of you.

What does it mean to cast our cares upon God? The same word translated “casting” is used in Luke 19:35, when Jesus was about to enter Jerusalem, and the disciples had obtained a colt. They brought it to Jesus, and they threw their cloaks on it. This is a transfer, just like throwing a blanket onto something.

You gather up all the things that are troubling you right now – you bag them up, you throw them onto the Lord.

This transfer is total. Peter says to throw all. 

How would this be humility? How is this the way that you humble yourself? Because if you don’t give these worries to Him, you are saying that you plan to keep them and deal with them yourself – because you believe that you can deal with them better than He can.

Many of our hardships really work to wake us up from a dream where we imagine that we have control over our lives.

What is it you think that you control? If He didn’t give you the ability to think and function, you couldn’t have done any of it. Just remember the great Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar who celebrated all that he thought he had accomplished in his kingdom… and in a moment God reduced that man to a beast-like existence.

When you cast these things on the Lord, you aren’t truly giving Him anything. You are simply acknowledging what He already has in His control.