A Gospel View of Worry预览

The Reason We Worry

In verse 24, Jesus said: No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. In verse 25, Jesus goes on to say this: Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.

The word therefore that begins verse 25 means, for this reason. So, this word, therefore, that begins verse 25, is connected to the idea in verse 24. This means that in these two verses, Christ was saying: Because you cannot serve the two masters of God and money at the same time, do not worry, because if you worry, you are not serving God, but instead, you are serving money.

In effect, Christ was saying in these two verses that, when we worry, we are worshipping money, not God, and we are showing that money has displaced God in our lives to become the real god that we are worshipping. In other words, when we worry, we are guilty of the sin of idolatry.

An idol is anything that, if we lost, we would not consider life worth living because it is what gives us our sense of meaning, security, purpose, and satisfaction in life. This can include our work, our ministry, our family, our identity, our assets, but especially, our money and our assets. So, consciously or unconsciously, money, for these people in this passage that Christ was addressing, had become the idol in their lives that they worshipped.

The simple truth is that, in the end, we will lose anything, including money, that we put our hope and trust in more than God. It will fail us. Only God lasts forever, and for this reason, the only thing we cannot lose is God and our relationship with Him, which stretches into all eternity.

So, we can summarise our second R by saying that, in this passage, Christ was saying that the reason we worry is that, consciously or unconsciously, in our hearts, we allow money, and our material possessions, to become our idols and to displace our true worship of God, who is forever solid and sure, unlike our money and material possessions which we can lose.