Who Do You Trust
When worry and anguish divide our minds and make us question God’s provisions, Jesus calls us to trust our heavenly Father, who has redeemed us and promises to care for us through the wilderness of this life.
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Who Will You Trust
Good Morning. One of the sins everyone faces is on full display this morning across our lessons, and it’s a sin that we face so often, we don’t always even think of it as a sin. It’s Worry, It’s Anxiousness. It’s the belief that God won’t give us what we need. Worry reveals what goes on in our hearts.
The word Jesus uses in our Gospel lesson for anxious has the idea of a divided mind. We become double-minded when instead of dealing with what’s before us, we focus on all the possibilities. We begin living in a world of “what ifs,” even if those what ifs contradict one another. This could happen, or that could happen, and neither one may ever happen, and then what do I do? So, Jesus tells us three times in this part of the Sermon on the Mount, “Do not be anxious.”
It’s probably good to clarify that this isn’t a command to not care about things. Jesus isn’t saying, don’t plan. Jesus Himself prepared for His ministry by fasting and praying. He told His disciples precisely what to do after His resurrection. In a parable on counting the cost of discipleship in Luke 14, Jesus warns: Who, before building a tower, doesn’t first sit down and figure out if he has enough money to finish it. That’s a paraphrase.
A great example of this- Steph and I grew up going to Orioles games. So, when you go in downtown Baltimore a multi-million dollar “Ghost Ramp” sat above the highway by the stadium exit for 25 years. It never had a car drive across it before it was torn down. That’s not counting the cost.
When Jesus says, don’t worry, He doesn’t mean don’t prepare. Jesus also isn’t saying don’t be concerned about the things we have responsibility over.
If a child is about to run into the street, yeah, stop him. That’s Concern. Worry is what happens when we spend our energy on things we can’t control. Concern can lead to action. Worry doesn’t change or help the future. Jesus says:
Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?
Worry cannot give us anything. It cannot make us taller. It cannot make tomorrow turn out the way we want it to. Anxiety can’t add another hour to our lives. But ask yourself the reverse question. Can anxiety take away hours? We all know the answer to that.
Worry robs us of the strength we have today. We can’t change tomorrow by worrying about it, but we can absolutely make today miserable. We can become so consumed with what might happen, the worst case scenarios, that we end up failing to live faithfully the life God has given us.
But Jesus is saying something deeper than simply, “Worry is bad for you.” That’s a good proverb you don’t even need Jesus for. The question is really,
Who will you trust?
That brings us to one of the most tragically familiar chapters in the Bible, our Old Testament lesson from Exodus 16. Israel had been rescued from Egypt. They had seen the 10 plagues as the Lord delivered them from Pharaoh and how God had just brought them through the Red Sea. It’s only one month later, and they are already crying how God can’t provide and wondering whether leaving Egypt and a life of torturous slavery had been a mistake. In verse 3:
Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.
After everything they had already seen God do, they are wondering whether the God who delivered them can actually provide for them, can give them food and water. And if we are honest, we can do the same thing.
Will the Lord provide what they needed? Would He give them food? Would He give them water? Would He care for them?
And the Lord answered their worry by providing for them. They didn’t even know what this strange food was, so they called it ‘What is it?’ or, in Hebrew, manna. God gave them food and water throughout their forty years in the wilderness, and even their clothes and shoes did not wear out. He took care of what they ate, what they drank and what they wore.
Now listen again to Jesus: “Do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?”
Those are not random examples. Jesus is deliberately taking us back to Israel in the wilderness. Israel asked, ‘What will we eat?’ Jesus asks His disciples whether they will trust their heavenly Father to provide?
And Matthew wants us to see something else. Throughout his Gospel, Jesus is presented as the greater Moses. Moses led Israel out of slavery to Pharaoh. Jesus leads His people out of slavery to sin and giving Himself for us.
So here we are, having been redeemed by Christ, still traveling through the wilderness of this world. And Jesus asks us the same question: Will you trust Me?
Look at the birds of the air. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Look at the flowers of the field. God clothes them. Jesus’ point is not that food, drink, and clothing are unimportant, but that if God cares for His creation, how much more does He care for His children.
Being anxious isn’t simply ineffective, but for Christians, worry is a form of grumbling against God. It says, “Lord, I will follow You, but first You have to prove that You are going to take care of me.” Just like what Israel was complaining about in the desert.
That’s what Jesus means when He says, “For the Gentiles seek after all these things.” Here, “Gentiles” is not simply a reference to people who aren’t Jewish.
Jesus is speaking about those who don’t know or trust their Heavenly Father, who live as though everything ultimately depends on them because they have no Father to provide for them.
That’s the life of worry, to say with our mouth that God is our Father, but to live as though everything ultimately depends upon me. That’s why this is more than a lesson about managing worry. It is a question of faith. Who will you trust?
How can we tell someone that Christ is sufficient if we are constantly living as though He is not? We do not know everything that tomorrow will bring.
We do not know where every provision will come from. But we know who brought us out of Egypt and redeemed us from slavery to sin. We know who has promised never to leave us and where He is taking us.
So when tomorrow comes, it’s fine to be concerned where God has given us responsibility. But where we cannot control what happens, we don’t have to live in fear. We know who holds tomorrow, even when we can’t see it. The question isn’t will hard things come, it’s what will you do when they come. Who will you trust?
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