We all have the same amount of it. Some of us wish we had a bit more of it. Some of us fritter it away and wish we had it back. Time is one of those precious commodities there is only so much of. God has given many gifts to us. One of those gifts is time. And for those of us who have had our eyes graciously opened by the gospel so that we have new hearts and therefore a new perspective on life, we now long to be good stewards of our time. Or do we?

Often we can be so busy with life that we don’t take the time to think about time and how we use it. We don’t master it, it ends up mastering us. The Bible has much to say about how we are to use our time and what our priorities should be. The Old Testament wisdom book of Ecclesiastes (chapter 3) tells us there is a time for everything. God is not a stingy God telling us we can’t enjoy the good things in life. He is a generous God who lavishes us with good gifts. But God is also intimating in that passage that there is an appropriate time for every activity.

When it comes to having a big picture perspective on time, stepping back and asking what is really important, few passages are more helpful to the Christian than what the apostle Paul says in Ephesians 5. In verse 16 he writes, “Make the best use of your time, because the days are evil.” Wisdom recognizes that the times in which we live are evil times and therefore wisdom seeks to make the best use of the time we have.

We are more likely to think that the times in which we live are harmless or challenging, but evil? That is what God says. But we will only understand this as we see things from His perspective. There is nothing harmless about an age that regards leisure as an antidote to work or entertainment as an antidote to boredom. As one person wisely put it, “We weaken our spiritual immune system as we breathe in the pollutants that ultimately destroy time’s value.”

When forced to think about it, we all recognize that time is a precious commodity. Our lives are but a mist and they are gone (James 4:14). Our age is obsessed with the idea of living for the “now” and turning a blind eye to eternity. But God’s word everywhere calls us to ask ourselves the question, “Am I seeking to live for God’s glory in the light of eternity or for my own glory in the light of the here and now?”

All Christians want to make a difference during our few brief years in this world because we are thankful for what Christ has done for us. But do we consciously plan for how best we can make a difference with the time we have? This is the very point the psalmist makes when he writes, “So teach us to number our days that we may present to You a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). Do I realize the brevity of life and then live in the light of that sobering reality? Am I making my life count for Christ?

This is all so heart-searching because if we are honest, we know how much time we waste on the trivial and frivolous things in life. Time wasted on the computer, too much TV, and on and on. We all have regrets that we have wasted time and squandered one of the most precious resources that God has given to us.

But God’s word addresses our regrets as well. In Joel 2:25 God says, “I will restore to you the years the locusts have eaten.” God’s gracious promise is to make up for the years we have served sin and self rather than God. You may be reading this and have terrible regrets about your life – the way you used your time or money, broken relationships, squandered opportunities, and you are overwhelmed with guilt and regret. God sent His Son into time and space to bring forgiveness through the gospel. And that same gospel brings motivation to want to change. God often uses these regrets to get our attention. But then He applies the balm of the gospel and patiently starts growing us.

One day we will all step into eternity when time will take on a different hue for us. But today I am living here and now. How will I use my time? And more importantly, for whom will I use it?

The Lord Jesus always has competition for the affections of our hearts. Perhaps that is especially true at this time of year. Good becomes enemy of the best. We allow the lights and the presents to overshadow what is at the heart of the celebration. We allow a shallow and fading joy to rob us of real joy. We may sing about it with our lips, but if we are honest, we have a hard time adoring Christ the Lord.

And there is one reason above all others why we don’t adore Christ as we might, why gifts win out over God’s gift. We don’t often have a strong sense of the greatness of our sin as an offense against God. The Puritan John Owen wrote: “He who has slight thoughts of sin never had great thoughts of God.” We don’t find God’s grace amazing because we don’t find our sins all that great and troublesome. We are looking through the wrong end of the telescope when we think about our sins. We see them as small and inconsequential. And until we are persuaded of what the Bible says, that we all deserve God’s eternal judgment, Christ will not be truly precious to us.

Allow the wonder of this truth to grip your hearts – Jesus, God the Son, left the glories of heaven where there was no sin to come into a world full of sin. Sin is what compelled Christ to come. More precisely, it was His love for sinners that compelled Him to come and suffer in the place of all who trust in Him. As the apostle Peter put it, “Christ suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order that He might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).

A mission was planned within the Godhead before the foundation of the world (1 Peter 1:20-21) and it was put into operation in Christ’s incarnation. What did this journey from heaven to earth involve? The apostle Paul tells us: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). In this verse Paul ties together the birth of Christ with His reason for coming.

In this verse Paul turns our attention to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Grace is one of those Christian words that can easily roll off our tongues without really appreciating what it means. This verse describes grace in terms of two aspects of the life of our Lord Jesus.

First, though He was rich He became poor. When was Jesus rich? Paul is pushing the frontiers of our thinking back to the period before His birth, into eternity past, to His eternal existence with the Father. He was rich in the glory He shared with His Father before the foundation of the world.

But there is a second dimension to this grace. Why did Jesus become poor? “So that we through His poverty might become rich.” Paul tells us that Jesus who was infinitely rich became infinitely poor so that we who are infinitely poor because of our sin might become infinitely rich and know the joy of the forgiveness of our sins. Have you grasped the spiritual poverty that is ours by nature and what Jesus has done to remedy that?

It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said upon coming to the West, “This western world is like a shop window in one of our great cities where all the price tags have been changed around. The really valuable things are priced as next to nothing, and the worthless things are most valued, and people will give everything, including their life for them.” We clamor after things that are perishing, and thinking we are self-sufficient, we give no thought to how spiritually impoverished we really are by nature.

Jesus did not come “to help those who help themselves.” He came to help those who are utterly helpless. Do you ever sit down and think about this if you are a Christian believer, that this is what Christ has done for you? What riches are yours!

Our zeal and our adoration have been tempered by the material and the ephemeral. We get more excited about a football game than we do about gospel realities. Our hearts are tugged in a thousand different directions because that one essential tug is often missing. Go back and contemplate the cross. It alone can explain how great our sin and misery really are. Jesus was born to die. The more we see our sin, and call it what it is, the more we will see the beauty of Christ, and the more we will adore Him, Christ the Lord.

In my last article, we talked about the importance of faith and repentance as lifelong practices if we would live healthy, vibrant Christian lives. The Puritan Thomas Watson put it this way: “Faith and repentance are the two wings by which the Christian flies to heaven.”

There is a misconception that many people have in our day that faith and repentance are one-time acts at the beginning of the Christian life, and these really have no vital place in our day-to-day living. That is one of the most soul-damaging beliefs a Christian can hold for reasons I will mention.

I want us in this article to consider why daily faith is so important to healthy Christian living. I am not thinking about faith in general, the kind of faith that we are to have in God for our daily needs, but a specific focus of our faith, which the author of Hebrews calls “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2). What does he mean?

Fixing our eyes on Jesus fundamentally means remembering what Christ has done for you, that if you are truly resting in Christ He has fully and forever paid the penalty for all your sins. And now you and I are to live in the light of that great reality every day of our lives.

But as Christians we are constantly forgetting that. What I don’t forget is my sin. To use Martin Luther’s language, sin makes us curved in on ourselves, and we can’t do that and grow spiritually. When I am introspectively curved in on myself, I will only know despair, discouragement, bondage, guilt and lack of peace. Why? Because my heart is full of sin.

We try to live the Christian life in our own strength, but that is a sure recipe for failure. As redeemed sinners, we need to ponder every day how much Christ loves us, because that is our motivation and encouragement for living the Christian life. You and I never mature beyond the cross. It is the beginning, middle and end of the Christian life because it provides God’s strength to live that life.

The gospel isn’t as deeply ingrained in the Christian heart as it needs to be. Every day the Christian must grow in his or her confidence that through our union with Christ we are loved, accepted and forgiven. And that can’t change because as we sometimes sing, “Jesus paid it all.” As the 19th century Scottish pastor Robert Murray M’Cheyne put it, “For every look you take at your sin, take ten looks at Christ.” Only that will keep me from despair and help me to press on. Only that will encourage me to desire to live for the Lord.

Many of us have been taught that the gospel is only for non-Christians. That is not true! Christians need the gospel every bit as much as non-Christians. Jesus said to His disciples, “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

One of the reasons we struggle so is because, as the Puritans used to say, “We live below the level of our privileges.” We are rich in Christ. Faith means keeping my eyes fixed on Jesus because He is the source of my encouragement. God wants us to grow beyond a mere shallow understanding of gospel grace because He knows that is the one thing that will keep us motivated to live in a world where our three great enemies are the world, the flesh (our sin) and the devil.

What motivates and encourages you to live the Christian life? It must be Christ and His sure love. The apostle Paul prays that we would grasp “how long and wide and high and deep the love of Christ” is for us (Ephesians 3:18-19). Paul knew that this truth needs to be deeply rooted in our hearts. Our lives are to be shaped by the power of the gospel.

When we understand this, and live in the light of it, it makes all the difference in the world. We are all sinners and will be until we die, but we have gospel resources for living God-honoring lives. If you are Christ’s, you have spiritual riches beyond the wealthiest person in this world. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). Don’t live like a spiritual pauper.

The Puritan Thomas Watson wrote, “Faith and repentance are the two wings by which the Christian flies to heaven.” He was reminding us of something we can easily forget – faith and repentance are not merely the beginning of the Christian life, but the middle and end as well.

In future articles, I will talk about the importance of faith and repentance individually in our daily living, but here I want to highlight the importance of Thomas Watson’s words, that the healthy Christian life is one where we consciously live and practice, from the heart, and by God’s help, faith and repentance.

This bears repeating. Faith and repentance are not merely one-time acts we perform at the beginning of the Christian life when we come to rest in Christ alone for the forgiveness of our sins. They are to be lifelong acts. To change the metaphor from flying to walking, faith and repentance are like my two feet walking, one foot, then the next, right, left, right, left, faith and repentance, faith and repentance. Otherwise, spiritually speaking, we will either limp or hop along in the Christian life, and certainly stumble!

These twin graces need to become as normal to us spiritually as breathing is to us physically. Why do I say that? Because faith and repentance are so essential to our new life in Christ that neither can exist apart from the other. They are two sides of the same coin of our new life in Christ.

This is the way the Christian life begins. In Mark 1:15, Jesus summons us to “repent and believe in the gospel” as our response to the good news that God forgives sinners who trust in Christ, believing He has borne our penalty as our substitute.

We may tend to think, largely based on the order in which the words appear, that Scripture teaches that repentance precedes faith in our experience. That position may be outlined like this: we will never come to trust in Christ until we feel sorry for our sins, so repentance must always be first. That is mistaken and unhelpful for a couple of reasons. First, it confuses repentance with conviction of sin. We all know it is possible to be convicted of sin, but not repent. Sometimes the deepest levels of conviction may be experienced after rather than before I come to faith in Christ.

But this thinking is also unhelpful because it tends to promote the view that I need a fixed amount of repentance as a necessary qualification or condition for coming to faith in Christ. In actuality, we must think of the relationship between faith and repentance as twins. Repentance is true repentance only when it is motivated by faith’s grasp of the mercy of God in Christ. I will never want to repent unless I know there is forgiveness from God. And God assures us there is…in Christ! So if repentance is a true turning of my life to God, it is also a turning to God in faith. But it is equally necessary to stress that true faith is always penitential in nature, and does not exist unless I turn away from sin to Jesus Christ.

And this is true throughout our living of the Christian life. Just as we continue to trust in Christ as our Savior and Lord, we continue in the life of repentance. Salvation is salvation from sin. Sinning is lifelong, so repentance must be lifelong. Throughout the Christian life, we never get beyond resting in Christ and turning from our sins.

When God draws me to Christ, He becomes the most important thing in life to me. And out of gratitude for all He has done for me, I want to live for Him. If this is not the driving dynamic of my heart, I have not understood the gospel. And when I have understood this, I will now want to cling to Him in faith and continue turning from my sins in repentance. Left, right, left right!

Which one of the Ten Commandments do you most often break? If you are honest and know your heart, you would probably say, like me, “All of them.” But if I were to ask you which one of the Ten Commandments do we most often neglect, without any pangs of conscience when we violate it, what would it be? My guess is it would be the Fourth Commandment on keeping the Sabbath Day holy.

We find murder, adultery, lying and stealing all abhorrent, but most Christians give little thought to the Fourth Commandment. Keeping the Lord’s Day holy has all but vanished in our contemporary church context. Sunday is now, more often than not, looked on as just another day of the week.

This insightful quote has been attributed to Methodist Bishop Arthur Moore: “It is said our great-grandfathers called it the holy Sabbath, our grandfathers the Sabbath, our fathers Sunday, and we call it the weekend. We have substituted the holiday for the holy day, recreation for reverence, games for godliness, and dissipation for devotion. We use the gift of the Lord’s Day to destroy the Giver.”

Very few in present-day evangelical America have ever been taught the profound significance of Sabbath or Lord’s Day observance. Even raising this issue in our day invites looks of astonishment which convey, “What century are you from?” To suggest that the Fourth Commandment applies today goes against the tide of all that we have ever known in our lifetime.

With the radical changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century, Sunday slowly lost its distinctiveness as a day set apart for rest, God-centered worship, Christian fellowship, and acts of mercy. Consumerism eventually became the all-consuming force, dictating every aspect of life.

Is this God’s will for His people, or does He have something better for us? As always, we must ask, “What does the Bible say?” It is our infallible guide for life. Few know or understand the meaning of the Fourth Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy” (see Exodus 20:8-11). What does it mean that God makes a day holy? He sets it apart from its everyday use for a special purpose. That purpose is to delight in God, in our salvation in Jesus Christ, and in our hope of heaven.

Our Christian lives can be quite harried simply because of the busyness of life. The Sabbath helps us keep things in perspective. It gives us time to ponder the love of Christ for us and the encouragement and assurance that His love brings to our hearts. We need that more than we know.

The Sabbath Day was instituted by God at creation (Genesis 2:2-3), along with marriage and work, as a creation ordinance. In other words, the Sabbath is a part of the very fabric of the creation order. Only later does God reinforce the importance of the Sabbath in the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Jesus also taught that the Sabbath was made for the blessing of man (see Mark 2:27-28).

Why did God institute the Sabbath at creation in the first place? Sabbath means “rest”. The Sabbath points to our future eternal rest with God, what we know as heaven. From the beginning God has planned for man’s enjoyment of Him for all eternity. With the fall into sin this blessing of heaven was lost; but God has restored this eternal blessing with the coming of Jesus Christ who brings the forgiveness of sins to all who rest in Him.

Many Christians feel threatened by the Fourth Commandment, but God has given it to us as a signpost to heaven. On the Lord’s Day we are given a preview of our heavenly rest as we set aside our common earthly labors, and experience a foretaste of heavenly glory. The Christian, redeemed by the death and resurrection of Christ, has begun to taste that glory, and longs for his or her heavenly home.

God has provided something beautiful for His people, and for the most part we view it as an inconvenience to our busy lives. If we are honest, our greatest temptation is that we want what we want more than we want the spiritual blessing God wants for us. Could it be that we really only believe in nine commandments?

I wonder if we realize how much our values and attitudes are formed and shaped by the culture in which we live and by the cultural air we breathe in. Let me mention just one example of this and introduce it by way of a question – Are you a thankful person? Does thankfulness characterize your life?

We might be thankful occasionally, but if we are honest, most of us would have to say it doesn’t describe a detectable theme of our lives, both on the inside at the level of our hearts and on the outside by our words and attitudes. We struggle with all the challenges life throws at us, and that takes our focus away from what God has blessed us with. Or we grumble and complain because so and so has more than we do. And so we envy and covet – another man’s house, or wife, or possessions.

Is it any wonder we are so lacking in contentment? Ingratitude is no respecter of persons. We can be young or old, rich or poor, black or white, healthy or sick.

One of the primary reasons Christians are not very thankful is because we have our eyes fixed more on the temporary than on the eternal. Our Lord Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). We have persuaded ourselves that our lives have meaning based on what we have – wealth, beauty, status – and the respect it commands from others. We feed our souls on the world’s trinkets rather than on the riches of God’s grace.

The Christian, of all people, has solid, eternal reasons for being thankful. Many people are thankful because of their circumstances; the Christian is thankful in spite of his or her circumstances. The Christian has reasons for being thankful that transcend their circumstances.

If my life is to be regularly characterized by thankfulness as a Christian, it will be as I ponder deeply all that God has done for me in Jesus Christ. Nothing and no one can take that away from me. He is the friend of sinners (Matthew 11:19). He became sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). He came to give his life a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28). He suffered for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18). He ever lives to make intercession for us (Hebrews 7:25).

That may be hard for some of us to take in because we have so many “distractions” competing for our time and attention. But the Lord wants us to live the here and now in light of the eternal. The more self-consciously God-centered and Christ-centered I am in my daily living, the more thankful I will be because I will view everything through this God-centered and Christ-centered lens. But I have to allow these things about Christ’s love to go from my head to my heart. I have to ponder them.

That means I can be thankful even when things go badly. The Puritan Matthew Henry was robbed one day. He went home and wrote in his journal four things for which he was thankful:

1. That he had never been robbed before.
2. That he lost only his money and not his life.
3. That he was not the robber.
4. That he had so much laid up in heaven that no robber could ever steal.

The values of our culture won’t let you believe that, but God and his grace will. Imagine how different our lives would be, and the impact we might have on others for the gospel, by a life that radiates thankfulness, a thankfulness that is rooted in Christ’s gospel love to us.

How many people do you know about whom you can say, “Now there is a thankful person”? And more importantly, are you able to say that about yourself? Remember, as John Newton put it, “Solid joys and lasting treasures, none but Zion’s children know.”

Jesus’ well-known beatitudes at the beginning of his “Sermon on the Mount” are a series of descriptions of the heart of every true believer in Christ. They do not teach us what we are to do to become Christians, because our salvation cannot be merited by our good works, but they are the inevitable fruit of those in whom God has worked his saving grace.

I would like to think about one of these beatitudes with you. These descriptions are entirely antithetical to everything the world admires. The world thinks in terms of power and aggressiveness. But here comes this astounding statement, “Blessed are the meek” (Matthew 5:5). Jesus is saying to us here that life lived in God’s kingdom is very different than life lived by the world’s standards.

But what is meekness? Although the Greek word is translated by different English words – humble, meek, gentle – the word meek is a helpful translation. If it is the meek who are blessed, what is meekness? We need to understand that Jesus is speaking of spiritual, not natural, meekness. This is not something we are by temperament, but what we are by grace.

Meekness is the heart attitude of humble submission to the voice of God in his word and to the hand of God in his providences. One of the great hymns of the Christian church expresses this – “Whate’er my God ordains is right.” We also see this attitude in the life of Mary, the mother of our Lord: “Be it done to me according to your word” (Luke 3:38), when she discovers through the angel Gabriel that she will be the human means through which Jesus is brought into the world.

Meekness involves the attitude and response of the person who has learned to submit to difficulties – difficult experiences and difficult people – knowing that in everything God is working for his or her good. At its core, it involves trusting God in every situation. It is the attitude and conduct of being humble and gentle toward others, and therefore involves a willingness to lay aside my “rights”. A meek person is able to endure mistreatment from others with patience and without bitterness or resentment. They have the grace to be cool when others are hot.

When the Christian is slandered or mistreated by another person at work (a colleague, customer, business rival), he responds with meekness. When he finds himself on the verge of revenge in some form, he allows a conscious response of meekness to come to bear on the situation. He patiently bears the injuries and faults of others. That is meekness. Meekness is often mistaken for weakness or lack of backbone when in fact it actually is a display of great strength.

What brings on this meekness? How is it worked within us? True biblical meekness is the child of Christian parents. Those parents are Jesus’ first two beatitudes – poverty of spirit and mourning over sin. There is an interrelationship among these beatitudes so that they build on one another. If I have truly come to understand how impoverished I am spiritually, it will cause me to mourn over my sin. And poverty of spirit and mourning over sin have the effect of making us meek or submissive to whatever God may bring.

The Bible gives two great illustrations of biblical meekness, one in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament. Numbers 12:3 says that Moses was the meekest man on the face of the earth. But that was not his natural disposition. It was a quality God worked in him over many years. He learned meekness while tending sheep for 40 years in the desert. He had plenty of time to reflect on his sin, to mourn over it, and to learn patience and submission to the will of God.

The second illustration of meekness is seen in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is one of the few personal qualities about himself to which our Lord ever drew attention. He described Himself as “meek and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29). The whole of his life was lived in meek submission to his Father’s will.

This understanding of meekness is the clue to so much that God does in our lives, yet only rarely do we recognize it. He wants us to be meek. But first he may have to break our pride, destroy our sense of self-sufficiency, and humble us under his mighty hand. He sends trials and reveals the secret ambitions we have hidden in our hearts. And as he patiently changes us, he develops within us this meekness of character. Now he can use us for his glory and for blessing in the lives of others.

You and I cannot help but breathe in the cultural air around us. We are not immune to its influences. One of those insidious influences is the way in which our lives have become increasingly shaped by the entertainment industry.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Entertainment in its place is good and to be enjoyed. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. But many things make good servants, and only later do we discover that they are terrible masters. We are, in the title of one book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

What are some of the problems with this “culture of entertainment” for the Christian? What are some of the dangers we need to be alert to? For one thing, entertainment has come to shape our values in a subtle but profound way. Let me explain.

What we do not realize is that to put anything in the place that God has reserved for Himself is to be guilty of idolatry. And the problem with idolatry is that it transforms the idolater. The idolatry of entertainment inevitably blunts our moral senses. Priorities become skewed. The trivial becomes crucial while the important is ignored. If we are honest, many of us care more for our favorite sports team than we do about the crisis in Haiti. It is not that we consciously ignore problems of which we are aware. We are not aware of them for the very reason that our moral senses have ceased to function because we are blinded by our idols.

Why is it that we are more offended by someone taking a pot shot at our favorite sports hero than we are by the fact that babies are being aborted by the millions? It’s not that we rejoice in abortion. It’s because our moral senses have been dulled.

When we come to worship the products of the entertainment industry, we slowly come to share its values. Entertainment is not bad in itself. It becomes bad when it shatters our moral compass.

But there is a second problem with the idolatry of fun in which we indulge. We latch on to finite objects to give us meaning and significance that can never satisfy in any lasting sense. The craving and the emptiness that drives much of our appetite for entertainment can only be satisfied by God. Only He can fully satisfy the restless longings of the human soul. The early church father Augustine put it memorably when he wrote, “God has made us for Himself; and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.”

Allowing anything in this world to be the ultimate object of my affections is never going to satisfy. Before I became a Christian, sports were my god. And I was empty on the inside. For others, their heart idol of choice may be wealth, or an obsession with physical appearance, or power. To ascribe such importance to created things rather than to the Creator is self-defeating. The New Testament tells us that God has given us all things richly to enjoy (1 Timothy 6:17). But the sinful impulses of our hearts take what is good and make it ultimate. We have worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever (Romans 1:25).

Our obsession with entertainment is our desperate attempt to find happiness and meaning in life. Many things provide a temporary high, but that high wears off, and eventually we need a greater high. We are looking in all the wrong places. Only Christ will satisfy.

Only as we come to make God the object of our love will we find our moral compasses become increasingly sensitive to right and wrong. He made Himself to fill the emptiness of the human heart. As we come to know God’s love in Christ, we come to enjoy Him. In the words of the old Presbyterian catechism, we were made to “glorify God and to enjoy Him forever”. That sounds so counter-intuitive to the person whose heart has never been conquered by God’s love in Jesus Christ. For many the search goes on. Our hearts are restless until they rest in Christ.

In my last article we considered how widespread anxiety or worry really is in the hearts of Christians. We are anxious because in this life we are forced to walk by faith, when we really want to walk by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). This is where trusting God is so important, but so difficult.

One of the things God is doing in our lives is growing us to trust Him. And He will often provide opportunities, sometimes very painful opportunities, to grow our faith. He wants to wean us from depending on our own resources.

In his “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew 6, Jesus mentions three cures for anxiety. He says we have forgotten three things. In the previous article we looked at the first of these – we have forgotten God and His character. Anxious people focus more on their circumstances, than on the God of their circumstances. Jesus says we are not to worry because God takes care of His children, those who are trusting in Christ alone for their salvation.

There is a second truth we forget when we are anxious. Jesus asks in Matthew 6:27, “Who can add a single hour to his life (by worrying)?” The answer, of course, is that none of us can. Anxiety never achieves anything constructive. But what is Jesus’ point? Is it simply, “Worrying never got anyone anywhere”?

His point is more profound. He has been speaking about our heavenly Father’s loving provision for our lives. Now He underlines one of the chief blessings of the Christian life – your life is in the hands of your heavenly Father. He has planned it all. He knows the end from the beginning. He designs each step of the way to fulfill His purpose for you and through you. Why worry when He has your life in His hands?

It is only when we want to take our lives out of our heavenly Father’s hands and have them under our own control that we find ourselves gripped with anxiety. I will be free from anxiety only when I want and trust God’s will for my circumstances above my own will. But this attitude will emerge in our lives only when our hearts are convinced that our heavenly Father can be trusted completely to supply everything we need. “Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things” (v. 32).

This is why the Bible has so much to say about the sovereignty of God. In fact the whole of the Sermon on the Mount depends on the fact that God rules over all things in this world, that His ways are perfect, and that His purposes will be brought to pass. That is why we pray in the Lord’s Prayer “Your will be done” (v. 10). That petition expresses our personal commitment to whatever God’s will for our lives might be.

And finally Jesus tells us when we are anxious, “You have forgotten the priorities of life.” Jesus says a third remedy for anxiety is to orient our lives around God’s priorities. Some people think that anxiety can be cured by getting more of what they already have. So many people make that fatal mistake. Often that will only produce more anxiety. Anxiety can be cured only by the assurance that all our needs will be met by our heavenly Father, and therefore the chief desire of our lives should be to seek to have His priorities.

And what are His priorities? We are to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness (v. 33). That is, we are to seek to live under His authority and long to see His kingdom extended in every way possible – morally, socially, geographically.

When our hearts are set on His righteousness pervading our lives, we have our priorities in order, and will discover two things. First, all we need, He will provide. He has never failed one of His children. And second, many of the things we thought we needed, we now discover we did not really need. We will discover that in the place of worry we have found contentment.

We live in days of great anxiety. Everything around us seems to encourage us to be anxious. But why should we be, when God, who rules all things, has become our heavenly Father? He has promised to supply all our needs (Philippians 4:19). The only question is, “Will I trust Him?” As the hymn says, “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.” That is foolishness to the world. But it is the Christian’s great consolation.

There is probably no more common sin that plagues the human heart than worry or anxiety. For many of us, worry is as natural as breathing. We lose sleep because of it. It produces ulcers. We see it in the lines on our faces. Our “worry-o-meter” often reads off the charts. It is rampant in our world. And it is rampant in the hearts of Christians.

We’ve memorized the Bible passages dealing with worry. Philippians 4:6 says, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” And prayer is absolutely vital. 1 Peter 5:7 also comes to mind: “Casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.” We know these things in theory, yet we continue to worry.

What’s missing? Our Lord Jesus, knowing us as He does, addresses this area which so often can cripple and defeat us. And although there are many different symptoms of anxiety – loss of sleep, loss of joy, loss of energy – there are really only a few causes of anxiety and worry.

In what we know as the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6, Jesus gives us the causes and cures for anxiety. He tells us that at the very heart of why people are anxious lies this significant reason – anxious people think untheologically about life. That is, God is left out of our thoughts. We pray, but we forget all that the Bible says about the One to whom we pray.

In verses 19-24, Jesus gives us three causes for this paralyzing worry – having our treasure in the wrong place, failure to focus spiritually, serving a master of the wrong kind. Each of these things, wrong treasures, wrong focus and wrong masters breeds anxious hearts.

But Jesus also addresses the cure for anxiety. He says worry is caused by not trusting God for all our needs. That is why He says “You of little faith” (v. 30). Worry is inconsistent with trusting God. It is a common law of science that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. This is as true spiritually as it is physically. Worry and trust cannot both be in the heart at the same time.

How does Christ deal pastorally with fear and anxiety? By feeding our faith. Notice He doesn’t simply say, “You are not trusting God.” He goes deeper than that. He says three things, each of which is absolutely vital. We will consider the first cure for anxiety here, and the other two in a future article.

First He says, “You have forgotten the character of God.” If the cure for worry is trust, then we must remember that trust has an object. It is God and His character. Anxious people focus more on their circumstances, than on the God of their circumstances. And when we do that, we are functioning quite normally when we begin to find ourselves anxious. Circumstances do make us anxious.

Jesus, in effect, is saying, “Your anxiety shows a lack of trust in God’s character, specifically, His knowledge of your situation and His love for you.” He takes as His examples things people often worry about – food, drink and clothing. Notice why He says we are not to worry – Because God takes care of His children. This gets at the heart of God’s character. If God cares for the birds and the flowers, how much more will He care for those for whom Christ has died on the cross.

Open a glossy magazine and read the advertisements. What do so many of them tell you? Life is centered on food, drink and clothing. What has happened? The basic necessities of life – life’s servants – have become our masters. When your happiness depends on the things which can make you anxious, you are setting yourself up for a fall. When our affections are on something other than the Lord Jesus, when that “something” is threatened, it will lead to anxiety.

Don’t forget the character of God – He is sovereign, He is wise and He loves us as He loves His own Son. When Peter was walking on the water, he took his eyes off of Jesus and began looking at his circumstances, the wind and the waves. And he began to sink. That’s what we do spiritually when we forget God and His character. He knows our needs. He has the ability to provide, and He cares enough to provide. Where do you worry? Where do you have “little faith”? Where have you forgotten the loving, gracious character of your heavenly Father?