Anxiety and the Christian Life: Part Three
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%206%3A25-34&version=NLT
Do Not Worry About Tomorrow
A Lenten Reflection on Anxiety, Trust, and the Faithfulness of God
Most of us do not think of ourselves as anxious people. We think of ourselves as responsible people. We plan, prepare, work hard, and try to stay ahead of what might go wrong. And often we tell ourselves, “This isn’t anxiety. It’s just wisdom.” Sometimes that is true. Responsible living is not the same thing as fear. But in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus draws a careful line—not between work and faithfulness, but between faithful effort and anxious control. That line matters.
When Jesus says, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear,” He is not speaking to people with disposable income, emergency funds, and backup plans. He is speaking to ordinary Galileans—day laborers, fishermen, small farmers, and craftspeople—people living under Roman occupation, heavily taxed, with no savings accounts, no safety nets, and no guarantees. If they did not work, they did not eat. Jesus is not telling them to stop working or to sit back and expect God to do everything for them. He is not offering a shallow promise that everything will work out if only they think positively. That would not be compassionate; it would be cruel. What He is addressing is something deeper. He is speaking to the way anxiety adds a second burden to people who are already carrying enough.
Before going any further, it is important to say something clearly. Some people live with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, PTSD, or other anxiety-related conditions. For those who live with these realities, the nervous system can sound alarms even when the heart truly trusts God. That is not a spiritual failure. It is part of living in a broken world with real bodies and real brains, bodies and brains that can also carry damage from the difficult road of life. Jesus is not diagnosing a medical condition here, nor is he scolding people simply for feeling afraid. He is confronting what happens when fear begins to run the show—when anxiety becomes not merely a feeling we experience, but a way of life we inhabit. When I say “anxious,” I do not simply mean feeling fear. I mean living as though the future finally depends on me and not on God.
Scripture never condemns effort. What Scripture does condemn is the illusion that outcomes rest finally in our hands. That is the difference Jesus is getting at. Working for an outcome can be an act of faithful stewardship. Trying to control the outcome is something else altogether. Faithful people work hard, but anxious control begins when we quietly start believing that the future depends more on our vigilance than on God’s faithfulness. That is why Jesus keeps bringing the conversation back to tomorrow.
A concrete example may help. Think about a parent. A faithful parent shows up. They love their child, teach them, encourage them, discipline them, pray for them, advocate for them when they can, and step back when they must. They do what is theirs to do today. That is real work. It is costly work, holy work, necessary work. But anxious control looks different. It replays the child’s future over and over in the mind. What if they fail? What if they fall behind? What if this mistake defines them forever? The future becomes a mental loop that never rests. And here is the hard truth we have to say gently: no parent, no matter how faithful, can guarantee a child’s future—not their success, not their happiness, not even their faith. Trying to do so does not make us more loving. It makes us more exhausted.
The same is true in work and business. The fear is not imaginary. Falling behind is real. Bills still come due. Employees may depend on you. Reputation matters. Faithful work means showing up, doing your best, making wise decisions, and taking responsibility for what is actually in your hands. But anxious control shows itself when the fear of falling behind never lets go, when the mind keeps running numbers late at night, when rest begins to feel dangerous, and when the heart quietly concludes, “If I do not keep pushing, everything will unravel.” At some point, faith requires a different kind of act—not working harder, but letting go. Not because the work does not matter, but because you have done what is yours to do, and now you must place the outcome in God’s hands, knowing that you may not get the result you hoped for and choosing to trust Him anyway. That is not laziness. That is trust.
This is exactly what Jesus means when He says, “Do not worry about tomorrow.” He is not promising success. He is not guaranteeing outcomes. He is freeing people from the crushing burden of believing that their worth—or even God’s presence—depends on how things turn out. Jesus never says, “It will all be enough.” He says, in effect, “Your Father knows.” That difference is crucial.
To feel the weight of this more deeply, it helps to look back at Exodus 17. There we meet Israel newly freed from slavery and wandering in the wilderness. They are in a real desert, with real thirst, and the threat is not imaginary. Their children and livestock are genuinely at risk. Their fear is understandable. But notice the question their anxiety produces: “Is the Lord among us or not?” That is not merely a logistical question. It is a theological accusation. Anxiety collapses the future into the present and assumes the worst. “If this is hard now, God must be gone. If I cannot yet see the provision, then I must be on my own.” Fear turns into testing God, demanding proof, demanding control.
God does provide water from the rock, but the place is named Massah and Meribah—testing and quarreling—because God meets their need without endorsing the posture that demanded it. If we are honest, that story feels uncomfortably familiar. How often, when pressure rises, do we also begin telling ourselves a story in which God has somehow vanished? How often do we interpret present difficulty as evidence of divine absence?
When Jesus stands on a hillside and says, “Do not worry about tomorrow,” He is speaking into that long memory. He knows what happens when anxious people try to secure tomorrow today, hoard what cannot be hoarded, and let fear rewrite the story of God’s faithfulness. That is why He points to the birds and the lilies. They are not sentimental decorations in His sermon. They are living reminders that God has not stepped away from His world. Birds still gather food, but it is God who sustains them. Lilies still live through changing seasons, but they do not attempt to master tomorrow. Jesus is not saying, “Do nothing.” He is saying, “Do not carry what you were never meant to carry.”
His words do not cancel responsibility. They relocate it. We are responsible for obedience; God is responsible for outcomes. Or to put it another way, today has work and tomorrow has uncertainty, but God has sovereignty. That is why Jesus says, “Seek first the kingdom of God.” The kingdom does not replace work. It frees us from worshiping our work. It reminds us that our labor matters, but it is not our lord.
This is also where a word of grace is especially important for those who live with anxiety that does not simply disappear when they pray. If that is your experience, this text is not condemning you. Jesus is not asking you to feel differently on command. He is inviting you to keep entrusting your life to the Father again and again, even when your body and mind are slow to follow. Sometimes God calms the storm around us. Sometimes God steadies the storm within us. And sometimes He works through medicine, counseling, rhythms, friendships, and community. All of that is grace.
Trust, then, is not merely an idea. It is something practiced. One practice is to name what is yours and what is not. Once a day, ask yourself two questions: What is mine to do today? And what is not mine to control? Write both down. Then pray a simple prayer: “God, I will do what is mine today, and I will release what is not.” That kind of prayer begins to retrain responsibility without feeding anxiety.
Another practice is choosing a stopping point. Pick one clear boundary in your day—a time you stop checking email, a moment you stop working, a limit you normally ignore. Stopping is not laziness. Stopping is one way of saying, “The world does not collapse when I rest.” Rest can become an act of trust.
It is also helpful to identify one recurring “tomorrow worry.” It may be about a child, a job, your finances, or a health concern. When it surfaces, do not argue with it endlessly. Instead, turn it into prayer: “God, You know this. I place it in Your hands again.” If you have to do that repeatedly, that is not failure. That is formation. You are learning, over time, to release what you cannot hold.
Faith also means acting faithfully without securing the outcome. Sometimes that means applying for the job without knowing whether you will get it, having the difficult conversation without controlling how it ends, or doing the work without demanding an immediate payoff. Faith often looks like obedience without insurance.
And because anxiety thrives in isolation, one practical step is to say your worry out loud to one trusted person. Sometimes a simple sentence like, “Here is where I am struggling to trust God,” can begin to loosen fear’s grip. Anxiety grows in secrecy. Trust often grows in community.
Even the end of the day can become a practice of faith. Before sleep, pray, “God, I have done what I could today. I entrust tomorrow to You.” Then stop planning. Sleep itself becomes an act of trust. Trust grows not when the future finally becomes clear, but when we practice letting God hold what we cannot.
And that leads to the deeper question Lent places before us. When pressure rises—financially, relationally, vocationally—what story do we begin telling ourselves? Do we quietly ask, like Israel in the wilderness, “Is the Lord among us or not?” Or can we learn to say, “My Father knows what I need. I will do what is mine to do today, and I will let God hold tomorrow”?
At this point we need to be clear about one more thing. This sermon is not finally about learning how to hold life together better. It is about learning to look to the One who already has. Before Jesus ever preached the Sermon on the Mount, before He ever said a word about worry or tomorrow, He was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. That matters, because the wilderness is where God’s people have so often struggled. Israel failed there again and again, testing God, fearing scarcity, and asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” Humanity failed there even earlier, in another kind of wilderness, reaching for control, grasping what was not ours, believing the lie that God was withholding something good.
But Jesus enters the wilderness and does what no one else has done. He faces hunger. He faces temptation. He faces the invitation to secure His future by His own power. And He refuses. He does not turn stones into bread. He does not seize control. He entrusts Himself fully to the Father. Where Israel failed, Jesus is faithful. Where Adam grasped, Jesus trusts. Where we try to control tomorrow, Jesus rests in the Father’s care.
And He does this for us.
So when Jesus later stands on the hillside and says, “Do not worry about tomorrow,” He is not offering a theory. He is speaking as the One who has already walked that road and remained faithful. This means the sermon is not calling you to squeeze strength out of your own inner resources. It is calling you to fix your eyes on Him. You are not being asked to conquer anxiety by sheer effort. You are being invited to trust the One who has already conquered the wilderness.
So when tomorrow feels heavy, when you have done what you can and it still does not feel like enough, remember this: Jesus has already gone ahead of you. Jesus has already trusted the Father where we struggle to trust. And Jesus now invites you to live today in the freedom of His faithfulness. You do not have to hold tomorrow. He already does.
So hear His words again: “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” Jesus does not remove the work of today. He removes the tyranny of tomorrow.