Anxiety-Free Living, Part 2

Anxiety-free living, worry-free living, fear-free living is part of what the Lord offered those who put their trust in Him. It is not just heavenly bliss and heavenly peace and heavenly joy, but here and now there is peace and joy to be found. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. It's been said, anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained. So how do you stop even that first trickle of worry? How do you keep concerns about sickness, your income, or paying your bills from consuming your thoughts and robbing your joy and curbing your passion for God? Is a life free from anxiety truly within your reach right now? Keep those crucial questions in mind today as John shows you from God's Word how to experience anxiety-free living.

That's the title of our current study and with today's lesson, here is John MacArthur. Let's return in our study to the twelfth chapter of Luke, Luke chapter 12. And we are looking at verses 22 through 34 under the title, Anxiety-Free Living. There is in chapter 12 a very long discourse given by Jesus.

It actually starts in chapter 12 verse 1 and runs all the way to chapter 13 verse 9. That is one event, one place, one discourse with a couple of interruptions to answer some questions, but nonetheless this is one long teaching time with the Lord Jesus. And here in His teaching in verses 22 to 34, the issue is in the Kingdom of God we can have anxiety-free living. Our Lord told people they should not be anxious, they should not worry and they should not be afraid. Anxiety-free living, worry-free living, fear-free living is part of what the Lord offered those who put their trust in Him.

It is not just heavenly bliss and heavenly peace and heavenly joy, but here and now there is peace and joy to be found. If you will notice, the emphasis of this passage comes in three particular commands. Verse 22, do not be anxious, verse 29, do not keep worrying, verse 32, do not be afraid. They could all be translated with the word stop...stop being anxious, stop worrying, stop being afraid. This passage, by the way, parallels our Lord's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount back in Matthew chapter 6, verses 19 through 34 where He said essentially these very same things on another occasion much earlier in His ministry in a different place.

This is in Judea, that was up in Galilee. And I simply say that to remind you that these are truths that our Lord taught many, many times, not just the few times they're recorded in Scripture, but these are the things that He taught day after day after day through His ministry. Now He is calling here for worry-free, anxiety-free and fear-free living. He is saying that it is possible to rise above all the troubles of this life, to have what the Apostle Paul called the peace that passes understanding, that is the peace for which there is no human explanation. It calls for an end to anxiety and fear and worry and panic and all those things that can be so debilitating, so disturbing and so depressing and distracting in life. There really are only two categories in which you can direct your worry, your fear and your anxiety, either into the material side or the spiritual side, right? You're either going to be concerned about something physical, material, earthly, or you're going to be concerned about something spiritual, immaterial and heavenly.

Those are the only two categories. You are a physical being and a spiritual being, in that sense you're two, an inner man and an outer man. And worry can be attached to both. But in the case of one who belongs to the Kingdom of God, worry in either sense is unnecessary. In regard to our material needs, verse 30 says, your father knows that you need these things. In regard to our spiritual needs, verse 32 says, your father has chosen gladly to give you the Kingdom.

He will give you whatever you need to sustain your life in this world and he will give you all that you need to sustain your life in his Kingdom. Worry then is unnecessary. Worry is a result really of two things. It is a result, first of all, of ignorance and or unbelief. There are, I'm sure, people who worry not because they don't believe what God has promised, but because they don't know what God has promised. And the greatest way you could cheat a believer, the greatest way you could cheat anybody is to limit God, or to teach them things about God that are not true, or to give them a diminished view of God. In fact, this is a form of idolatry. Any misrepresentation of God is an idol.

And worshiping and giving homage to a misrepresented God is a form of idolatry. It is incumbent upon all who teach the Scriptures and all who possess the Scriptures, meaning both us and you as well, to come to a true understanding of God so that we worship Him, not just in spirit, that is not just with our emotion and all of our faculties, mind and soul, as well as every physical part of us, but to worship Him in truth. It is critical that we understand who our God really is. And so it is possible to worry your way through your Christian life simply because you're ignorant. And that, unfortunately, is the legacy of many, many people where ministries do not weigh heavily in on the nature of God, the character of God, the promises of God and the purposes of God. Their people are cheated and very often don't understand the greatness of God, the glory of God, the commitment of God, the compassion of God, the power of God, the omniscience of God, the wisdom of God and all the rest in which we rest in the promises of God. There are many people, Christian people, who have no idea what their God is really like and the level of commitment He's made to them. And so they live in fear, fear of circumstances, fear of Satan, fear of failure, fear of you name it.

So it is possible that your life is full of fear and anxiety and worry because of ignorance. That can be dispelled simply by reading the Psalms. If you think it's a long course, if you have to go to seminary to get to know God, you're wrong. Just start in Psalm 1 and 150 days later finish Psalm 150 and you will have come to know your God.

And, of course, all the rest can be filled in. But that's why we read the Psalms because we come to worship God and we need to know the God we worship. If you do know your God and you worry anyway, this is not about ignorance, this is about distrust.

This is a sin. To be needlessly ignorant is sinful, but to be willfully distrusting of the God who has revealed Himself is a serious sin. So when you look at your life and you see anxieties and fears and worries, the question then is, am I ignorant of my God or do I just not trust Him?

So let's go back to some basic things, okay? In this passage, our Lord unfolds this whole issue of why we are not to worry and be anxious and be afraid, either in the material or the immaterial, the physical or the spiritual, the earthly or the heavenly realms. Number one, worry is a failure to understand God's priority. Worry is a failure to understand God's priority. Verses 22 and 23, He said to His disciples, for this reason I say to you, do not be anxious for your life as to what you shall eat, nor for your body as to what you shall put on, for life is more than food and the body than clothing.

Now here's the point here. God didn't create you just to survive. God didn't create you just to have you eat and wear clothes so that you could make it. God did not create you to fulfill some physical goal or objective or purpose or design. Your life is far more than eating.

Your life is far more than clothing. God's purpose in giving you life, God's purpose in giving you a body is not material, it's not physical and it's not earthly. It is immaterial, spiritual and heavenly. We were made for His glory. We were made to serve His glory, to serve His purpose, to honor Him, to bring attention to Him, to proclaim the gospel, to live out Christ and the power of the Spirit in the world. And as long as that's the divine priority, that's God's priority or purpose for us, He will sustain us to the end of His purpose. In fact, you can work hard and save and the Bible says you should save and you should work hard and you should be a good steward and you should make good investments and all of that. But in the end, it wouldn't matter whether you did that or gave it all away as far as the divine priority is concerned because whatever you wear and whatever you eat isn't the reason God put you here.

There is a completely different reason you're here and it's a spiritual one. So you could give it all up and you're not going to heaven till God wants you to and He will provide whatever it is that you need to get you to the place where it's your time. On the other hand, you could save a fortune.

You could amass a huge estate. You could build bigger barns everywhere and you're not going to live one day past when God determines that your ministry is over. That kind of thinking tends to make you rich toward God and to put your treasure in heaven rather than here. So worry, anxiety and fear fails to understand the divine priority, that God has a purpose for your life and He's going to make sure you live to fulfill that purpose. Second, we said, worry is a failure to understand God's provision. That is to say that everything you have comes from God. It may come through your work and through your savings and through your diligence and through your talents and your training and all of that, but in the end, it really is God's pledge to you that sustains you. And the point is made in verse 24, consider the ravens, they neither sow nor reap, they have no storeroom nor barn and yet God feeds them.

Here's the point, how much more valuable you are than the birds. And that leads to the third point which I just introduced last time, worry is a failure to understand God's privilege. Worry is a failure to understand God's privilege. Verse 25, and which of you by being anxious can add a single cubit to his life span? If then...verse 26...you cannot do even a very little thing, why are you anxious about other matters?

What is this about? This is about the idea that somehow you control the length of your life, okay? Which of you by being anxious is going to add a single cubit to his life span? Now you have to see that cubit is used here sort of metaphorically or analogically. A cubit is a measurement from the elbow to the end of the fingers, about 18 inches they use this as a unit, a unit of measure. One cubit would be a unit of measure in ancient times. And so it's not the idea of adding to your physical stature. I mean, nobody particularly wants to go from five ten to seven six. And if you did, it wouldn't be a small thing, verse 26, if you cannot even do a very little thing, that wouldn't be a little thing, that'd be a huge thing. That's not what it's about.

It's using a cubit metaphorically or analogically. You can't add a unit to your life. You can't add to the years of your life that God has determined for you.

Can't do it. So if you can't do it, if you can't add a single unit to your life, if you can't even do that very little thing by all your worry and fear, then what are you doing worrying and being anxious about all these matters like your body and your clothing and your food? People in our world today are consumed with this idea of health.

We all get sold on this. It's not how long a person lives, but how they live, right? But we have literally made a god out of health and longevity in our sterile modern world where we manage to conquer bacteria and virus and things like that where we've created sort of an antiseptic antibiotic environment. We're very concerned about being able to prolong life and everything we eat, you know, has this graph of percentages and amounts of all these things. You decode everything you eat. You know, you've got to get the code on what you're eating so you can check out all these ingredients and who cares whether you add life to your predetermined plan by God. You can't do that.

You're not going to be able to do that. This is just the sign of the time it's infiltrated the evangelical world. This generation is engaged in a health mania. It's not wrong to be disciplined. It's not wrong to be moderate. It's not wrong to avoid the sin of gluttony. It's not wrong to be wise. It's wrong to be foolish about what you eat.

You want to take care of yourself. God created a wonderful, wonderful food world for us so that we can make good choices. And I'm not going to add to my life, but I would like to live my life with a measure of strength so that I can serve the Lord the way He should be served. And I don't want to fall into sin by being gluttonous and overindulging and lacking discipline. But I'm not going to add one day to my life.

The optimum of my life has been determined by God. And with certain reasonableness, I just want to maintain my strength but I'm not going to add to my life. Makes me want to eat a big plate of cheese fries. I mean, you get the point. Worry doesn't help. If you worry about how long you're going to live and you spend all your money on that and you waste all your money, really waste all your money being unable to add anything to your life, that's not good stewardship. And I'm not talking about being healthy. You need to be healthy.

You need to beat your body into subjection. You need to be reasonable in how you conduct your life and how you use the resources that God gives you and not be dissipated and gluttonous and all of that kind of stuff that steals your energy and robs you of the strength that the Lord desires to use. But you're not going to do anything to add to your life. It is His privilege to determine where we're born, to whom we're born, when we're born and how long we're here. God has given us life. He will sustain that life until our service is done.

Worry makes no contribution. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. If we live obediently to His Word, He will sustain our life to the end.

You can't lengthen it beyond the purposes of God. So verse 26 says, if you cannot do even a very little thing, like add a unit to your life, why are you worrying about what you're going to eat and what you're going to wear? This is a failure to understand God's priority and that is that your life matters spiritually and achieve a spiritual end. God's provision that He will sustain that life to fulfill that end and God's privilege. It is God's to determine when we live and when we die and how we fit into the redemptive scheme for the advancement of His glory and His Kingdom. Number four, worry is a failure to understand divine preference.

It's a failure to understand divine preference. I know we live in a society that teaches evolution and, you know, we're just supposed to be the latest form of an ape. We're just the last monkey, at least the newest monkey at this particular point in the evolutionary process and we're no different than anything else.

We're just animals and these environmentalists and these lovers of animals get all caught up in this. But look, we're Christians and you can look at the world of God's creation and you will see a massive gap between everything He created and man created in His image. And we bear the divine preference. Look at verse 27, here's an illustration.

Consider the lilies, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin but I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory didn't clothe himself like one of these. If God so erased the grass in the field which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, how much more will He clothe you, O men of little faith? Now we get to the sin part here. Our Lord turns from the issue of food to the issue of clothing here. In the physical world, those are the two things people are concerned about.

They're concerned about nourishing their body and protecting it. And He makes a comparison that reveals His preference for people, especially, of course, His own children. And He says, consider the lilies. The word lilies is not something to be understood in a technical sense because in verse 28 He says, God so erased the grass, lilies and grass are basically synonyms. The word lilies is broad enough, the word grass is definitive enough to let us know that He's talking about the wild grasses that grew all through the Middle East and the land of Israel that flowered in various ways. In 1 Peter 1.24, Peter quoting from Isaiah, all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers and the flower falls off.

So this is just Jesus saying, and He may have pointed as He may have to the birds. I mean, consider the...look at the wild flowers growing all over at the end of these stems of grass. There were so many different kinds of them in Israel. You see terms in the land of Israel, even in ancient times like Iris and Nasturtium and Gladioli, those are more modern terms, Latin derivative terms to describe various kinds of flowering plants. They even had certain kinds of daisies and poppies such as we have in California and cap lilies.

It's just the general grasses that flower. Look at them how they grow. They don't toil.

They don't spin. They don't labor over their clothes. They don't labor over their beauty. And yet if you take a petal off of a flower, even a wild flower, and you look under a microscope at its intricate texture, color, design, form, it's staggering. You can take the most beautifully manufactured garment out of wool or out of cotton or out of some synthetic and look at it under a microscope and it looks rough.

You look at a flower petal and there's a refinement there that only God can make. And so He says, look, they don't work to get their clothing. I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory didn't clothe himself like one of these. Now the best dressed man in the history of Israel was Solomon. If you read 1 Kings 10 and 2 Chronicles 9, you read about the lavish attire, the lavish life of Solomon.

And as the best dressed man, he had the finest garments. But even Solomon in all his glory didn't wear things like the petal of a flower. And you know, if you love flowers and Patricia keeps such a beautiful garden at our house, we love those flowers. I never walk through our garden in the front or the back or the side without thinking about the amazing creativity of God and His obvious love for beauty because they're here and they're gone. They live and they die and they serve no spiritual purpose other than to give this little brief testimony to a God of beauty and a God of order and a God of design and a God of infinite variety. And the point is this, if God...verse 28...so arrays the grass in the field which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, how much more will He clothe you, O men of little faith? Come on, do you understand God's preference? This is the issue, folks. Fear, worry, anxiety is about a lack of faith...a lack of faith. And Jesus used this a lot, Matthew 6.30, Matthew 8.26, Matthew 14.31, Matthew 16.8, He even referred to it back in Luke 8 when He said to the disciples who were worrying about drowning, you know, where's your faith?

You think the God of the universe who is calling you to be His Apostles and Preachers is going to let you drown? What are you being anxious about? What are you fearing? What are you worrying?

Why the panic? If you know My promise and you know My power, then it's a question of trust. And if you don't trust Me, now you've got a sin problem. Do you not trust My knowledge? Do you not trust My wisdom? Do you not trust My compassion? What is it about Me you don't trust? Do you not trust My power? Do you not trust My care?

What is it about Me you don't trust? Or maybe you think the devil is stronger than Me? There's a blasphemous thought. Now He's not saying these people didn't have any faith. He called them men of what? Little faith. They're the ones who believe in Him. He's directing this, it says in verse 22, to His disciples, those who are true believers and those who are becoming true believers. And He says, it's possible for you, He says, to worry and fear and be anxious, but understand this, if that is the case, you have a problem with trusting Me.

And that's a serious problem because would you agree with this? He's worthy of our trust, right? You can trust Me. You've been listening to John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, here on Grace to You. His current study, Anxiety-Free Living, is showing you that in every circumstance, every relationship, and every season of life, God has provided what you need to drive away worry. Now John, you made it clear today that worry is a sin that must be dealt with. Well, one thing that a Christian can be tempted to worry about boils down to this question, Is my salvation sure? John, we understand, right, that Christians do have those times of doubt.

You just don't want to live there. Well, of course, there are times when we doubt our salvation because Satan is tempting us to doubt. That's a strategy of the devil, to cause us to doubt, to use things in our lives that may, maybe, make it appear as if either God is not on our side, or God is not with us, or we're somehow disconnected from Him. And it's also very true that you can lose your assurance, you can become a doubter even as a true believer in times when you're sinning in some kind of a pattern, because assurance of salvation is a gift from the Holy Spirit to an obedient, faithful, godly believer.

You don't need to doubt if you're a true believer. And when you find those times of temptation or those times of sin that lead you into doubt, you know the way of escape, of course, and that is prayer and repentance and obedience. But perhaps what's at the root of your doubt may be a failure to actually understand the reality of your salvation. That is to understand that it is an eternal salvation. So we'd love to send you a free booklet titled, A Believer's Assurance. This is a universal problem with Christians. Obviously, there are some Christians who worry about it more than others because they have bad theology, but every Christian faces a moment or two or perhaps a prolonged period of doubt, and you can have an answer from the Word of God that's provided for you in this little booklet called, A Believer's Assurance. It identifies eight reasons that people lack assurance, and it talks about those reasons, and it gives you a solution to looking at the doubt in your own life and how to deal with it, kind of a catechism for dealing with doubt, a 12-part question and answer to help you think through why you're doubting and where is the path to victory.

It's a quick read but powerful and effective, and it cuts to the issue. It's titled, A Believer's Assurance, available free of charge. All you have to do is request it. Do it today.

Yes, do. Perhaps you don't doubt your salvation, but you know someone who does. A Believer's Assurance would be an ideal gift for that person.

Again, it's free. Just request a copy when you contact us today. Our number here, 855-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. A Believer's Assurance will help you answer questions like, Do I have a saving relationship with Christ? What are the marks of a faithful Christian?

And how do you come to Christ in the first place? Again, to request this booklet called, A Believer's Assurance, call our toll-free number, 855-GRACE, or go to the website, gty.org. Also, keep in mind that you can listen to or download all of John's sermons for free at gty.org.

That includes every lesson from this current series titled, Anxiety Free Living. And to keep up to date on the latest radio series or books or free offers from Grace To You, make sure to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Just search for Grace To You. Now for John MacArthur and the entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to watch Grace To You television this Sunday. Check our website to see if it airs in your area, and then join us tomorrow when John continues his series, Anxiety Free Living, with another half-hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace To You.