Text: Matthew 6:25-34
OPEN:
"It is a pity that this passage is often read on its own in church, isolated from what has gone before." (John Stott)
This incredible statement about God's promised provision flows naturally from Christ's model prayer for daily bread. Here, Jesus enumerates our daily bread: food, drink, clothing. And he illustrates God's provision from creation: birds, flowers.
And then, Jesus provides an unmistakable principle for Kingdom living: Confident expectation in God is the way of righteousness. "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness/ Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow." This is Hebrew parallelism: two statements with the same meaning, stated in slightly different ways.
In Scripture, the opposite of worry is waiting. Anxiety is replaced by peace; despair is erased by hope.
But, as Jesus makes plain, this waiting is not resignation but is, instead equivalent to seeking. Waiting is an inner acquiescence, releasing our striving and abandoning our lives entirely to the will and work of God. Quieting our whole selves, we surrender our activity, our plans, and our dreams. When we wait, we yield up our expectations of what God should do, our precious hoards of ritual and doctrine, our social awareness, and our self-concepts. Waiting may be described as abandonment to God; totally submitting to Him and inviting God to move in our hearts with complete freedom.
Even though waiting is not an outward activity, it is something that we do. The Hebrew word most often translated as “wait” (hul) literally means “to swirl, to dance, to turn.” It is a joyful expectation. I like what Howard Macy says: “It is not leaning back in a rocking chair on the front porch of our hearts, watching with bemused curiosity to see if anything interesting will happen.” Or, as Bernard of Clairveaux put it, “Waiting upon God is not idleness, but work which beats all other work to one unskilled in it.” It is a movement of the heart that can be nurtured. It is in waiting that we learn to listen to God. In waiting we display an active confidence in God that cannot be deterred by circumstance. It is the biblical equivalent of faith.
The Psalms actually give multiple images of waiting on God:
Ps. 69:3, “Worn out with calling, my throat is hoarse, my eyes are strained, waiting for my God.”
Ps. 40:1, “I waited and waited for Yahweh, now at last he has stooped to me and heard my cry for help.”
Here's the bottom-line for believers: Worry is to be replaced by waiting.
How may I develop this confidence in the Lord?
I. PATIENTLY EXPECT GOD TO ACT.
"Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all."
The idea is that if the Father knows, he will act.
1. One way to learn waiting is to live in hope.
One psalmist clearly connects waiting and hope as he sings, “Rest in God alone my soul! He is the source of my hope” (62:5).
The Hebrew noun for “hope” in this instance is related to one of the main verbs used to speak of waiting for God. In fact, several of the words used for “waiting” for God can be translated accurately as “hoping” in God. The Hebrew words are qawa=”to hope for”, and yahal=”To put hope in, expect.”
This clearly suggests that confident expectation is an important part of waiting.
Another Old Testament song pictures the sturdy expectancy of this waiting:
Ps. 130:5-6, “I wait for Yahweh, my soul waits for him
I rely (wait) on his promise,
My soul relies (waits) on the Lord
More than a watchman on the coming of dawn.”
These lines portray neither wavering hope that wonders whether the desired dawn will ever come, nor pushiness that would seek to drag the sun over the horizon before its time. There is, instead, waiting filled with confidence and patience. In this kind of expectancy we anticipate that God will hear us, will come to us, and will transform us.
2. One of the striking facets of the Bible is how often the ideas of “waiting” and “strength” occur together.
Probably the best known passage is Isaiah 40:31, “Those who wait (hope) on the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”
But this connection is made elsewhere. Psalm 27:14, “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”
Waiting builds strength because it moves us away from self-reliance and toward dependence on God. Dependence comes quite easily in times of emergency, but waiting wants to teach that God is more than an emergency kit to be opened only after we have made a mess of life on our own.
In a broader way, waiting for God builds strength because in waiting we mature toward seeing life in truer perspective.
There is a bold serenity in this kind of living. The early Anabaptists had a name for this: Gelassenheit, a word variously translated as “calmness of mind,” “conquest of selfishness,” “tranquility.” One persecutor of the Anabaptists observed with disapproval that they “dance and jump into the flames, see the flashing sword without dismay, speak and preach to the spectators with laughing mouth; they sing psalms and hymns until their soul departs; they die with joy as if they were in a merry company, remaining strong, confident and steadfast until their death.”
II. STILL THE NOISE.
"And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life?"
So, how do I move from worry to waiting?
1. Besides waiting expectantly, waiting for God is also to learn stillness.
“Be still and know that I am God” (Ps 46:10).
The Hebrew verb here has the idea of “pause a while.” The word is rapa and it literally means “to hang limp, sink down, to be lazy.” It is to drop what you are doing, take a deep breath and relax. “Be still and know that I am God, exalted among the nations, exalted over the earth.”
This pausing to wait is connected to recognizing the absolute sovereignty of God over all the earth and over all the nations.
Often it is in gentle stillness that we can come to know God, overwhelming in both majesty and tenderness.
Madame Guyon: “The interior life, that is, the inward life of the spirit, is not a place that is taken by storm or violence. That inward kingdom, that realm within you, is a place of peace. It can only be gained by love.”
2. Even recognizing the necessity of stillness, it is extraordinarily difficult for many of us to practice it.
Both outer and inner noise hinder us. The sheer volume of external noise and clutter around us can deafen us to the voice of God. Disturbance is everywhere: phones, sirens, arguments, chitchat, the beeps and bells of electronic gizmos. For many, radio and television provide background noise from morning til night, even during meals.
Even religious activity can become noise that inhibits the stillness of many.
H. Macy: “Religious activity is noise all the same, and it can easily drown out the gently, steady call of the Holy One.”
3. Practical Steps Toward Stillness:
1) Reduce the volume of outward voices, many of which we can control.
- Simply turn off the radio and TV and use them only selectively instead of as a musical wallpaper.
- Choose carefully the number and types of voices to which you will listen. An interest in the news can easily become obsessive and destroy stillness.
- Plan tasks and appointments so that you can move from one place to another without needlessly creating inner hurriedness.
2) Recognize what, in fact, our duties are.
- Many of us saddle ourselves with obligations that are not ours and go far beyond what duty requires, often harming ourselves and others.
- Often it is our own weakness that upgrades requests to the status of “demands.” We twist our own arms out of pride or our insatiable need to please others.
- If we are to establish stillness in our lives, we will have to say “no” to some good things and to some nice people in order to have it.
- Ironically, it is waiting for God, which we so seriously jeapordize with our over-stuffed calendars, that can help us learn what to take up and what to turn away.
3) Actively create places and times of stillness.
- Put it on your calendar and guard it as jealously as any other appointment. Even 5 minutes of silence between appointments or before class. 15 minutes to stroll beneath the trees.
- Planned times of solitude feed the inner stillness, which can grow to permeate even the most active parts of our lives.
4) Learn the discipline of meditation and listening prayer (also called “contemplative prayer”).
- To approach God with an incessant stream of words is a filibuster, not prayer.
H. Nouwen: “Contemplative prayer is not a way of being busy with God instead of with people, but it is an attitude in which we recognize God’s ultimate priority by being useless in his presence, by standing in front of him without anything to show, to prove, or to argue, and by allowing him to enter into our emptiness. It is not useful or practical but a way of wasting time for God.”
5) Fasting can help still our noisy hearts.
By refraining for a time from food, from certain habits of buying and entertainment, or from other activities, we can break the cycle of false urgency and impulsiveness that will dominate us if we allow it.
III. ABANDON YOURSELF TO GOD.
"But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well."
1. A persistent barrier to waiting is our reluctance to allow God to be completely in control.
This is not surprising since the fundamental character of sin is for us to want to be in charge of our own lives. We go to great lengths to assert our independence.
We even try to dictate the terms of our devotion to God. Yet, waiting on God requires giving God complete freedom to act.
H. Nouwen: “God dwells only where man steps back to give him room.”
2. Abandonment to God is not simply a one-time choice, but a continuing discipline that can be learned.
This is an act of the will. Better yet, it is surrender of the will. This embodied in Jesus’ Gethsemane prayer: “Nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done.”
O. Chambers: “Are you prepared to let God take you into total oneness with Himself, paying no more attention to what you call the great things of life? Are you prepared to surrender totally and let go? The true test of abandonment or surrender is in refusing to say, ‘Well, what about this?’ The moment you allow yourself to think, ‘What about this?’ you show that you have not surrendered and you do not really trust God. But once you do surrender, you will no longer think about what God is going to do. Abandonment means to refuse yourself the luxury of asking any questions.”
CLOSE:
Are you worrying or waiting?
Have you learned to wait on God?
Do you wait with unshakable confidence that He will act on your behalf?
Are you characterized by joy in your waiting rather than discouragement and defeat?
Do you need to rearrange your life to create space for stillness so that you can wait on God?
Are you surrendered to God right now? Not some time in the past or even yesterday but right now? Jesus said to take up his cross daily and follow him. Surrender is not a one-time event but a daily and even constant abandonment to Him.
What needs to change in your approach to life or in your schedule in order to make room for God’s control?
(Dr. Dane Fowlkes, pastor)
