Christ's Command: Do Not Worry (1): Do Not Worry About Your Life (Matthew 6:25, 27, 34) by Rev. Martyn McGeown
I. The Activity
II. The Object
III. The Futility
Martyn Lloyd-Jones: “If you lie awake at night for hours, I can tell you what you have been doing; you have been going around in circles. You just go over the same old miserable details about some person or something. That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think. That means that something else is controlling your thought and governing it, and it leads to that wretched, unhappy state called worry … We must have discovered this in ourselves, or perhaps when we have tried to help to deliver other people who are suffering from a condition of worry. The conversation starts with the particular thing that has brought them to you. You then provide the answers and show how unnecessary worry is. You will find, however, that almost invariably they go on and say, 'Yes, but …’ That is typical of worry: it always gives the impression that it does not really want to be relieved. The person wants to be relieved, but the worry does not; and we are entitled to draw that distinction. Our Lord does it Himself when He talks about the morrow taking thought of the things of itself. That is personalising worry … If it cannot work up its case on the facts it has before it, it does not hesitate to conjure up facts. Worry has an active imagination, and it can envisage all sorts and kinds of possibilities” (Sermon on the Mount, vol. 2, pp. 130, 147-148).