[5 Conversations With Christ] Anxiety and WorrySample

Give Your Worries to God

Anxiety and worry also impact us spiritually. This last point is the most important one. We have fear regarding provision. Some of us have been taught to worry by our families. In this passage in Luke, Jesus says God will provide. Our anxiety and worry, spiritually, comes from a feeling that God will not provide for us. 

Think of worry as a blinking red light on a dashboard. The blinking light is not the problem; what’s happening in the engine is the problem. The anxiety, the worry, is a notification. You struggle wanting acceptance, to be valued; you struggle with guilt or with what the future will hold. Yet Jesus is our foundation, our rock. How do you get your focus back on Jesus? 

See, worry won’t change the situation, but it will change you. It can give you an ulcer, a heart attack, or a stroke. It can mess up your relationships. It can change you with an addiction to pornography, alcohol, drugs, or anger. We worry and we get in a rut, going right down that same cognitive error that we may have had for decades. We hang by our fingernails on the edge of sanity. But there is something positive we can do: we can get on our knees before God, even when it is two a.m. We can give our problems to God. We can pray, “God, there is still a buzz in my heart, and I want you to do something deeper in me than I could ever imagine.” 

Do you show the same amount of compassion to yourself as you show to somebody else? If a friend shared a problem with you, you would encourage them. You’d say, “It is going to be okay. God’s going to make it okay. No, you’re not bad. You’re not ugly. You're not an idiot. Look at all that God’s done through you. Your success is not a fluke.” Showing compassion to somebody else is easy; I want you to show self-compassion. Give yourself a break. Have some grace upon yourself and allow the Lord to transform you.