Pastor Ralph Douglas West - The Battle Against Anxiety | Matthew 6:25-34

0:30 Thank you. Matthew chapter 6, beginning at verse 25 and concluding at verse 34. This is the word of God. You may be seated. Several years ago Mrs. West and I, we were in Greece and we stopped over at Mykonos, one of the isles off the Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea.

1:27 and we walked up to a booth. One, they were selling cheap crosses. I could never get the humor of that oxymoron out of my head, and next to it, they were selling worry beads. And I said to Sister West, let's get us some worry beads. I want to take them back as a gift to some people that I thought needed them. And the problem was I stood there worrying about what kind of worry beads I was going to purchase.

2:22 Worry, anxiety, distraction. Nobody gets past it, by the way, regardless of your station in life, all of us are touched by anxiety and worry, being divided and distracted. It seems to be part of the way life evolves. I mean nobody's exempt from it. Children are not exempt from it. They say to their parents, you know, leave the light on, it's dark in the room. Adolescents, they don't get past it They're coming out party possibly To go to a party with their friends Where they be accepted They worry about this This is not something to Raise your brow against Our adolescents Enter into eating disorders as a result of being bodily shamed.

3:45 Young adults enter it. Many of our young people, they graduated this month and for the first time, they really recognize I'm grown. Starting a new venture of life.

4:12 Trying to get into a graduate program as fast as they can so they can stay on their parents. ability track Many of you have experienced that. You are entering the mid-career and you worry about promotions, demotions, subtractions, divisions. we saw it as one of the acts of this new administration when it says we're canceling out diversity, equity, and inclusion.

5:09 That it was turned into three bad words. that universities actually couldn't use certain language anymore or they could lose financial resources. You start getting older and you worry, you get anxious about, did we really save enough money? And then you enter into a space where you know

5:45 every day you wake up is a grace gift from God. Worry. I sense that most of you say that you don't relate to this. This is beneath me. Jesus preached a sermon. It's a brief sermon, chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Matthew. And I want to read to you the largest section of his sermon, one in every seven words he dedicated to what I just finished talking about by reminding the people who are on the countryside listening to him that day, don't worry.

6:42 And I want to tag this text, Overcoming the Demon of Anxiety. Therefore I tell you, Jesus says, do not worry about your life, what you shall eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear.

7:14 Is not life more than food in the body, more than clothes? look at the birds of the air they do not sow or reap or store away in barns and yet your heavenly father feeds them are you not much more valuable than they Can any one of you this morning,

7:42 by worrying add a single hour to your life? and why do you worry about clothes see how the flowers of the field grow they do not labor or spin yet i tell you not even solomon in all of his splendor was dressed like one of these if that is how god clothes the grass of the field which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire will he not much more clothe you you of little faith so do not worry saying what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear for the pagans run after these things and your heavenly father knows that you need them but Seek first the kingdom of his God And his righteousness And all these things will be given to you as well Therefore Do not worry About tomorrow For tomorrow will worry about itself Each day has enough trouble of his own Bye.

9:05 This is the sermon on the mount. And if we don't get anything from it, we at least know this much, that it begins with a prohibition, a command, a demand, an imperative. Stop worrying.

9:35 Some of you have King James version of the Bible. And the language has changed since 1611. That it says, give no thought. and some of you remember reading that very line give no thought thought kills it's a line actually that Shakespeare will put on the lips of one of his characters that they died of thought They died of worry. They died of anxiety and distraction. Sometimes, even now, you don't get papers anymore, much newspapers. But periodically, I'll pick up one in the hotel.

10:32 They'll have them out. And I'm not morbid, but I go over sometimes to the obituary column. I know I don't know the people because I'm in a place where I wouldn't know them. And yet I go down and they list sometimes how people died. cancer, heart failure, accident.

11:03 And I always come out with the same response. I wonder how many of these people who have died, died from worry. The World Health Organization says That over 352 million people today Suffer from some kind of mental illness Like the Sermon on the Mount One out of seven people in America And that was the 2021 listing You add these years to it And you might say one out of every five persons suffer from some mental disorder. And I know who I'm preaching to, hey, spare me. I've been pastoring all my adult life. And I know when you come to church, you say, preach that to them pagans because I'm a Christian and mental issues don't affect me.

12:04 Well, it might not affect you, but Jesus said it does. That it was so important that for every seven words he spoke, he said, let me talk to this group of people that grapple with worry. that word for anxiety is the same word where you get the word divided from you're distracted and that is one of the characteristics that i was reading up on just this past week about mental health issues is that whether it is a eating disorder sleeping wanting to live in the dark, staying out of the light.

12:59 The one thing that you can attach to it is that mental issues distract. It affects your memory, your ability to communicate, operate, to be productive. All of that, I guess now you're saying, Lord, I didn't come to church to be diagnosed this morning. And so Jesus says, stop.

13:35 Stop worrying. In other words, he's saying, don't live by the secular trinity. You know, those of you who are here this morning, you are what they call Trinitarian. you believe in the father son and holy spirit you are trinitarian you ascribe to the idea that you are spirit soul and body and jesus is saying stop bowing down at the altar of the unholy trinity the world the flesh and the devil because the unholy trinity is what produces anxiety distraction and worry and this morning he says stop it's a prohibition it's a command it's not an option he says stop that Thank you.

14:41 and let me ask you a quick how long is it gonna take you that when Jesus tells you stop that you actually stop I meet people, that's what my life is made up of. And I talk to people who, they start off this way. I'm blessed and highly favored. Until you start talking about putting their faith in the practice. And then all of a sudden they say, well, that go another one. Worshiping at the altar of the world of flesh and the devil. And there it is, an unholy trinity. Jesus said stop it. It's a prohibition. He says it's a command. It's an imperative. He says stop that. And you know he meant it because look at how many times he said it.

15:35 Look at verse 25. He says stop it. Look at verse 31. What does he say? Stop it. Okay, he didn't say stop it. Let me see. do not worry that's a prohibition that is stop worrying look at verse 31 what does he say do not what worry stop it it's a prohibition it's a command it's a demand it's an imperative what he says in verse 34 not only does he say stop worrying He said, and stop worrying about tomorrow. Tomorrow got enough stuff of its own. How about you deal with your stuff today?

16:30 And here is what we don't want. We don't want a God who gets all in my affairs because sometimes I like to be a worrier to make people cater to me. Oh, here they come. Come on, we got to pray for them.

16:58 And Jesus said, look, look. Stop. Worry. Stop being distracted. You're losing your focus of what life is. Do you understand what life is and what life looks like? And look what he does. I'm still in verse 25. As he begins to explain what is happening here in these verses, when he says, stop, stop, he is also saying, look at how God will provide for you. When you stop worrying, you make room for God's provision, that you see how God always works from the greater to the lesser. Look at it, he says, in verse 25, he reminds us, in this teaching, he says, I tell you, do not worry about your life.

18:02 And then when you follow it, you see how the greater supplies the lesser. he says in the very next line, he said, don't worry about your life, what you eat, drink, or wear. That's the lesser. The greater he is when he says, your heavenly father, you see it, knows how to take care of a bird. And if the greater knows how to take care of the lesser, how much would God do for you? Hey, if you're worrying, you'll close the door for God to provide for you. How about right now, you say, I ain't gonna worry about it. I'm gonna leave room for God to move into more human situation and let him provide for me. You say you didn't follow that. You didn't get that from the lesser to the greater.

19:00 Yeah, the greater is God creates. But the lesser is he gives spring. Spring, once it was on God's agenda, has never since creation had to say, is it my time to sprout up? Spring every year comes at the same time And it reminds us that the death of winter has passed And new vegetation has come The greater to the lesser If you have visual sight this morning Eye is the greater gift But he gave a lesser gift light In order for your eyes to work If you can hear this morning The great gift is your ear The sound is the lesser gift. In Exodus, as you missed that, the Bible says that God liberated Israel from the enslavement of Egypt.

19:59 Emancipation was the greater gift. The lesser gift was he gave manna, he gave bread, he gave water from a rock. That is, God says, if you let me handle your life, I know how to take care of what I have created. The reality is, when you look at a microscope, you've never been able, I can tell you, you've never been able to get a snowflake, put it on a microscope and say, that's half of a snowflake. You never looked at a tree and said, Lord, that's half of a tree. You never looked at a mountainscape and said, That's half of a mountain. Because whatever God does, he does it in completion. And if God can do that for a mountain, if God can do that for a tree, if God can do that for a river, if God can do that for a snowflake, what can God do for you?

21:03 Preach, Pastor West. I'm trying to help you this morning. And so this whole idea in which God has provided for us is there to remind us of how God cares and provides. In doing so, he says, and I'm not trivializing this, I'm still in verse 25. I may not even worry about getting through the rest of it. Very serious, because if you get this, you can unpack the rest of it. And what he's getting to now is to remind us that I didn't come here to satisfy your greed.

21:47 I came here to take care of your need. And I'm not playing with words. Give us this day our daily bread. That's what he had just taught them previous to this part of the sermon. And that is that God says, I'll take care of your need. and thus becomes the real issue of materialism and capitalism in America, particularly when preachers propagate a kind of spurious gospel to say that God blesses you by what you look at, what's in your garage or what's hanging on your closet. There are other people who got more than you'll ever have, but they never have a good night of sleep. They don't know what joy is. I didn't come to satisfy your greed. I come here to take care of your need.

22:44 And by doing that, he reminds us, by looking at three illustrations, and he says, I want you to look at the bird. Now that word, when he says, look at the bird, look at the bird, that is again a command in the same sense where he says stop worrying. He says look at the bird. That is become a student of the bird. Watch how birds operate. They prove that worry is unnecessary. They don't sow. They don't spin. That is they don't get up in the morning and say let me scatter some seed so next year I'll have something to eat. These old slick birds. Let you do all of that work and come and enjoy what you have provided for them.

23:40 In the back of our house, we have a little water fountain. And on this fountain, throughout the day, these birds show up. Red birds, blue jays, show up. Now, I need you to know that these birds have never paid one water bill that comes monthly to the West household. And yet, these birds have the bird gall to perch up, wash their wings, wash their little beak out, flap around, and sometimes they'll call some of their friends and they'll get in that pond and start flopping. I said, the nerve of them.

24:36 And then Jesus said, but if you pay attention to the life of the bird, I'll do the same thing for you. I have provided in the lesser order of creation that which you need to satisfy you through life and I have provided for you every day. No wonder the people sang, great is thy faithfulness. His mercies are new every morning. The Lord provides for us. Wait now. And then he goes on and said, these birds. These birds. One of my favorite birds is the bee hummingbird. Now this bird is about two and one eighth inches in length. it weighs the equivalent of two aspirants in the palm of your hand. They have never gone to UT's meteorology school.

25:34 No, no, no, no, no, they haven't. I asked, I asked a meteorologist in our church today, have a bird ever studied with you? He said, man, you done lost your mind. And yet, every year on cue, when the weather shifts and the north cold winds are coming, these bee hummingbirds who can flap their wings 90 times per second, don't try that, who can do that, fly all the way from Canada down to Mexico and then go over to the Panama and chill out in the sun while everybody else is cold. And as soon as the weather changes, without going to class. They say, time to pack up and go back home and they fly right back to where they started.

26:28 If God can do that for a bird, how much more can God do for you? The bird proves that worry is unnecessary. But then he shifts and says, and look at your life then. Look at your life. Your life proves that worry is unavailing. Quickly, notice he makes that one line. He says, and who of you this morning, if you worry, is going to add one inch to your height. When Jesus said that, it may have been humor. It was certainly a reality that the men in the audience, none of them had grown really, let's say the majority, had never grown to six feet.

27:22 But the Roman soldiers, these were burly and these were masculine. The physique, these men were towering over six feet tall. And Jesus says, I see you when you look at those soldiers. You have to tiptoe just to try to look, try to look in their eyes. But even that's on a slant. I want to ask you, you've been doing that, tipping on your toes. Have you grown any? I mean, there are boundaries, Jesus has said, that we live in, restrictions, that there's nothing that you can do about it. I was born in St. Elizabeth Hospital in Fifth Ward in Houston, Texas.

28:19 I was not born in a general hospital in New York, or Sinai, or Bethesda in Maryland. I wasn't born there. that's a restriction that I'm confined to I'm a baby boomer I was born in 1959 I wasn't born in 1859, 1759 or 2019. It's a confinement in that restriction that I live with. And the day that you can accept your confinement, your restriction, the boundaries that you live with, you'll stop trying to do what you know is beyond your ability to do. I'm not talking about school now. I'm not talking about career now. I'm not talking about limitations like that.

29:13 I'm talking about confinements of who you are. And once you understand that, you stop worrying about changing what cannot be changed. Just be who God has created you to be and live in that. Preach, Pastor West.

29:34 And then he says, I got to move on. He says, now look at the flower. Look at the flower. It's what the poet Blake says that I see, I see a heaven and a grain of sand. I see a world and a grain of sand and a heaven and a sunflower. A whole infinity in the palm of my hands and eternity in an hour. I believe that Blake is getting something from Jesus when he's saying this. He says, look at the wildflower. Not a pampered hothouse lily. Just look at an old flower that grows up everywhere. So when Jesus said this, and those of you who have been to the Holy Land, you've seen it. Those of you who are planning, I don't want to spoil your trip, but when you get there, you're just going to see hundreds of thousands of sunflowers, depending on what time of the year you go, just sprouting up everywhere.

30:34 But Jesus said what? Study the birds. Look at your life. And what about these wildflowers? Not tempered huthouse lilies. These are not lilies that's under protection. These are just old sunflowers.

30:57 And Jesus likened, he says, and Solomon. In all of his splendor. For those of you who don't know who Solomon is, he's the son of David. He becomes the king of Israel. And his wealth is so enormous that the sister from Sheba says when she gets to his palace and have heard about his riches and his wealth and his silks and his garments, she says the half ain't been told. Preach Ralph well. Read your Bible sometime. You'll enjoy it sometime. stay off of Netflix all the time and read the Bible sometime. She said, listen to what she said, the half. You're talking about wealth. Ain't been told. In fact, in fact, it is estimated today if you could reconstruct Solomon's temple, it would cost $96 billion.

31:57 Somebody up in Washington need to know who the real king is. And Jesus said, but not all of that material and capital wealth compares to God's creation. When you look at a flower, he said, look at that flower and you can learn something about a little wildflower. That in the sun, in the morning, when the sun rises in the east, it starts tilting its head. at noonday a sunflower stands straight up but when the sun starts setting it defers and bows its head in adoration come here if a flower knows how to wake up in the morning and say thank you if a flower knows how at the zenith of his career to say praise the Lord if a flower in the evening before it goes to bed knows how to say thank you for the day How much more should God's children in the morning say, thank you, Lord, for providing for me?

33:09 Oh, I got to sit down now. Stop worrying. Stop worrying. Now, I'm cutting across the lane now. Stop worrying. That one verse sets you up for the next verses. And so he says, now stop worrying about your present realities. I know what's going on in the world you don't have to remind me every day I know I know about anxieties I know about distraction I know what you're dealing with I know about the mental crisis I know it in America and by the way let me say this in case somebody leave as they were Pastor West prescribed for us a diagnosis and prescription that said we didn't have I ain't said that I'm giving you Jesus words as an encouragement to go get the help that you need I'm saying in a lesser life God has provided in the greater life what you need he's given you that life but he's also given you the doctors and the clinicians and the people and don't you listen to these super spiritual people telling you you don't need no help they may not need no help but you know the help that you need? Don't you let them, let me tell you, I know, I know how people are coming here, a sermon like this and say, don't you listen to that? That's just faithlessness.

34:34 I got a couple, several couples left our church and they moved away and gone to one of the charismatic churches where the man opened the doors of his church during COVID. And they left me because they said that I was faithless but I tell you what they still alive All right, you couldn't shout on that either. That's all right. I'll preach for myself now. It comes a moment where you got to get silly people out of your ear. You got to get foolishness away from you and know that faith got some common sense too. And so Jesus reminded them, he said, look at the birds, look at the flower, look at your life. He says, and look at your present reality. And in your present reality, all the worry in the world will not change it. And so then God says, you have to raise your life to a higher level to suffocate the gnawing demons that are trying to distract you.

35:41 Let me say it one more time. I like the way that came out. I didn't have it written like that, but I like the way. He said, God comes to you to say, I want you to elevate your life to a higher level so that the altitude can suffocate the gnawing demons that's trying to take you out of life. Clovis Chappelle said in one of his sermons, he said, he said there was a pilot that was on his way across the Pacific when he heard something under the cockpit floor. He knew exactly what it was. It was the gnawing of rats. The problem was he didn't know how long they had been biting at whatever they were trying to chew on. So he knew that they could not, the rats could not survive in a high altitude. So what he did was lift the nose of his plane.

36:36 And he started going a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, fifteen thousand. But by the time he got to 20,000, before he got to his cruising altitude, he noticed that the gnawing had stopped. When he landed the plane to his destination and they looked under the cockpit, they noticed that there were rats that was tearing into the very lifeline of the plane. But because he had gone to a higher altitude, the altitude suffocated and took the life from those rats. Stop trying to handle life on a low level. Come on up to a higher level and let God do something for you. Have a good day. May God bless you real good now. but on my way to heaven, I want one last thing to tell you and that is that this God of ours said don't worry about tomorrow.

37:39 Tomorrow got enough problems of his own. Don't worry about what's going to happen Monday. Just handle the rest of Sunday and God will handle what goes on on Monday. Have a guy company in here And so in this morning, he reminds us that something will happen if we learn how to wait and trust in God. Have a good day. May God bless you real good. I really didn't mean to go this far this morning, but learn how to trust in him. Learn how to lean and depend on him. Learn how to wait on him. He may not come when you want him to, but whenever he arrives, he's always on time. Have I got a witness here?

38:39 I'm trying to leave you alone, but my soul done got happy because I know who holds tomorrow. I know who holds me in the palm of his hand. I know that God is able to make a way out of no way. You know the song and I'll sit down with it who reminds us of tomorrow. How sweet to hold a newborn baby and feel the pride and the joy that it brings. Oh, but greater still, the calm, the assurance. We can face uncertain days because he lives.

39:39 And because he lives, I can face tomorrow. Because he lives, all fear is gone. Because I know who holds me.