Tomorrow will be Anxious for Itself
A word on living an anxiety-filled life
Anxiety is debilitating. The more you dwell on it, the worse it becomes. Hence the reason why our Lord exhorts us in Matthew 6:25-34 to not be anxious. This, from what I can see, is both a command and a plea. A command to not be anxious, to trust God with our lives, to believe that he has a plan, that he is watching over us, that he is protecting us, that he simply cares.1 A plea to come to him with our anxieties, our cares, our worries, our predicaments.
There are countless things and events that cause anxiety to flare up in our worry-saturated hearts, and a lot of it consists of worrying about the future. What will tomorrow bring? What will or won’t happen? What will the person say or not say? Will I lose my job or not? Do we need to move or stay put? The list is endless, indeed.
But it doesn’t have to be. There actually doesn’t have to be a list at all. Our minds, by the grace of God, can (and should) be free from anxiety. Worry doesn’t have to fill our hearts. Anxiety doesn’t have to weight us down. Stress doesn’t have to gnaw at us. We have to remind ourselves again and again that God is in control. He knows our future; in fact, he ordained it. Nothing will happen in your life that wasn’t ordained by your Heavenly Father.
O you of little faith—and the rest of us—you must look to the Lord. We must be on our knees in complete dependence on him. As the Reformer Martin Luther once wrote, “Pray and let God worry.” Of course, our Lord never worries. All things are in his sovereign hands. But we ought to let him take care of things. Our duty, our responsibility is to pray and surrender ourselves to God’s sovereign plan for our lives.
There are (at least) two parts that perhaps cause our hearts to be full with anxiety.
First, we need to take life one day at a time. We need not look into the future and become anxious. “We are not to carry cares before they come,” JC Ryle wrote. “We are to attend to today’s business and leave tomorrow’s anxieties until tomorrow dawns.” God is there, let him take care of it. It is when we take our eyes off Jesus and place them on the cares of this life that our minds spiral out of control. We weren’t created to be worry-warts. We weren’t made to always be dreading what may or may not happen in the future. God created us to live one day at a time, focusing on how to glorify him in all things.
Second, we must reckon with suffering. We will go through treacherous times in life. As DA Carson once said, “The truth of the matter is that all we have to do is live long enough and we will suffer.” And certainly as followers of Christ, we must prepare for difficult times: “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12). But this isn’t necessarily about persecution, but suffering in general.
We get riddled with anxiety because we desire (and sometimes even expect) care-free, suffering-free lives. But that’s simply not going to happen. We face death, we deal with sickness, we are surprised by car accidents and grief and diagnoses. Suffering is a part of life because sin is a part of life. We must understand that. The more we remember that and embrace it—while being in the loving, sovereign hands of our Heavenly Father—we can face the day. We can look the challenges of the day in the face and say, “I’m good because God’s got me.”
What we must do is what Jesus exhorts us to do. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matt. 6:33). Look to the Lord and he will guard your heart. Keep your eyes on Jesus and he will sustain your mind. Fixate on God and he will lift you up in times of distress.
There will be more moments in life that will beckon our anxiety. Don’t cave. Look to our Lord, our Savior, our Father. Look to the Holy Spirit, who lives inside you, for guidance. Don’t be anxious about tomorrow—God’s already there and he’s handling everything just fine.
Therefore, it’s sinful if we become anxious as it likely stems from a distrust in God and his plan.