Your Anxiety Belongs To Jesus

Well, good morning, church. Will you please turn to 1

Peter, chapter 5. And this morning will be found in verses 5 through 8.

So I'm going to read verses 1 through 11. I'm afraid the title that you have there in the bulletin, though it is corrected, is what

I asked for. It sort of gives away the point that we're going to come to, that your anxiety belongs to Jesus.

I'm going to read this passage that towards the end of this book that the

Apostle Peter has written. And he's been laboring to get the church ready for the suffering that they are going to endure because of Christ's name, which they proclaim.

And so he tells them that this is not uncommon. It's what all the churches have gone through. And you need to suffer for having done good.

And what good is it? And what credit is it to you if you will suffer for your own faults, and so forth?

Getting them ready to suffer for Christ's name. And finally, as the letter wraps up here, as he comes close to the end of it, the passage we have, sort of generalizes it.

This idea of the things that we encounter in life and how we're to handle them, the suffering that we have for Christ's name, yes, that's most of the letter.

And that's still in view. And yet now he opens it up so it addresses most of our life. The things that we endure are common to everything and it goes on in the common ways of mankind.

So with that little introduction, if you would please stand. I will read chapter 5, verses 1 through 12.

And then, as I said, we'll preach from verses 5 through 8. So I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed, shepherd the flock of God that is among you.

Exercising oversight, not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you.

Not for shameful gain, but eagerly, not domineering over those who are in your charge, but being examples to the flock.

And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crowd of glory. Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders.

Now our passage begins here with, clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility towards one another.

For God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time, he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you.

Be sober -minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of sufferings are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will establish, restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.

To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen. Please be seated. So we do all have this characteristic within us.

Even the most calm, most stoic amongst us do have some manner of this, and some of us have more and more and more of this thing that we're gonna preach about here.

Largely the subject of the message this morning is anxiety. Some of us show it in different ways than others show it.

Some of us show it more clearly than others, and it's more obvious in some of us than it is in others. It comes in all shapes and sizes, but we all have some anxiety.

Now anxiety, if I put it forth to you like that and say how much would you like to have anxiety today or tomorrow, would you like to be anxious about something?

How many of you would say yes, I do, I covet this. Can you give me some more anxiety about things?

No, that would be ridiculous. And yet, we all to some extent, some more than others as I said, are storehouses of anxiety.

We keep it. We, as it were, treasure it. We store it up.

We make a reserve of it. We have a vault full of it so we can open it in time of need and reach in and take out and say okay, there's some anxiety.

And that will help me through this moment, this situation, this providence, even if we give all the glory to God and understand that he is sovereign and this circumstance is his sovereign hand.

Yet we'll still reach into this reservoir, take a big drink of anxiety.

Anxiety is a little different than we often think about it, and this is what the passage really teaches us here as Peter wraps up this letter and sort of opens up these applications beyond suffering specifically for Christ to how we're to deal with one another.

So how many of you would like to keep your anxieties? How many of you would like tonight to have an anxiety that keeps you up again or over the months and years that you're anxious, as the doctors say, give you an ulcer, make you cranky?

And it gets worse than that, of course. A life of anxiety, a life of anxiousness has all sorts of effects on us mentally and physically and psychologically, and yet the scripture says here, don't be anxious for anything, said the

Lord Jesus Christ. Be anxious for nothing, said the Apostle Paul, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, give it to God.

Here in 1 Peter, we learn where the anxiety is to go, is to be cast upon Christ our

Lord. Well, let's look at this. Let's begin with that second part of verse five, and let's go through this sequentially.

Let's go through this in order and see what this says about ourselves, how much anxiety we keep in reserve for ourselves, we hang on to, and what we really are to do with it, and what that means to us in this life, and what that means to the glory of Christ our

Savior, the one who is to take upon himself this anxiety. Let's begin with, clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

There's much here. Right there, in just those few words, we could preach an entire sermon. Just clothe yourself, characterize yourself by this.

Be outward and inward by this characteristic of humility. To clothe yourself is to drape something over yourself, so this is what appears, and this is what the truth is, really.

It's not just putting on a veneer. It's clothing yourself from within, so that without, you're seen this way.

Now, the greatest example of this is, as you might expect, the Lord Jesus Christ, who in John chapter 13 clothed himself as the lowest, as the most menial of all servants.

Do you remember this? When he laid aside his garments, he put on what? The towel of a servant, and then what did he do?

He literally got on his knees before the disciples, the apostles, and washed their feet.

He was clothed with humility, but was he humble only because he looked humble, only because he had this menial servant's cloth about his waist, and said, oh, he must be humble because he's wearing that?

No. What he had outwardly was a sign of what was inward in the

Lord Jesus Christ, who said, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

He said, for I am lowly in heart. I am humble in spirit. That's in Matthew chapter 28.

Excuse me, Matthew 11, verse 28. So when

Peter says to clothe yourselves, he's not talking about some act we put on, some veneer that we put on.

He means from within, so that without, we appear to be what we truly are. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with this one thing, humility toward one another, submitting to one another in the love of Christ, as Paul says in Ephesians 4, 32.

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God and Christ forgave you.

This sort of humility and submission toward one another, all of us submitting, all of us being humble to one another.

As I mentioned, submission, there are brands of submission. You submit to your elders in one way. You submit to each other in another way.

A husband has a wife submitting to him in another special way that she doesn't to anyone else. But it's to all of us, this humility, this loneliness of heart.

And why? Paul gets, or excuse me, Peter gets right to it. Why would he have you clothed with humility from within?

For God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Now this is a quote from Psalm 55, where he says that God, excuse me, let me turn to it and quote it correctly.

Should be bookmarked right here. Cast your burden on the

Lord, excuse me, I'm still not in the right place. We'll go right back to 1 Peter. There it is.

To the shrewd he shows himself shrewd, but to the humble he gives more grace. That's the one I was looking for.

Thank you for your patience. God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. And this is the reason that we are to be humble with one another, to be clothed with this humility.

Because otherwise, you put yourself in a very dangerous position. You put yourself in a position where God is opposed to you, in a way he's actually hostile to you.

This word for opposed is a military term of facing an enemy who is in battle array against you.

In that day you might think of a company of soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, with the flanks of spears pointing your way.

And this is what is opposed to you. God opposes the proud when we are lacking in this humility, but he gives more grace to the humble, to those who imitate the

Lord Jesus Christ, to those clothed with the humility that comes from the conversion to Christ Jesus, from the working of the spirit within, from imitating our

Lord Jesus Christ. That kind of humility. God gives grace and more grace to be more like him.

And yet, when we are not humble, we are proud. There's really no two ways about it.

And when we're proud, we find ourself opposed in battle array by none other than God, our

Lord. So he goes on in verse six. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God.

Humble yourselves under God's sovereign hand. Humble yourselves under his might, his outstretched arm.

The mighty hand of God takes us back to Genesis, where God redeemed

Israel with a mighty hand, with an outstretched arm. And so, Peter, I believe, here, when he speaks of God's mighty hand under which we are to humble ourselves, we're to think that.

We're to remember that God redeemed his people from Egypt, that God, with that mighty hand, with his outstretched arm, ruined and destroyed, through Moses and through Aaron, the greatest nation in the world at that time, the superpower, the one that nobody could mess with, the one whose will really took precedence throughout the land, that nation.

God blew them away in the 10 plagues. God destroyed them.

They didn't see it coming soon enough, so it all came to pass, but that's the mighty hand, that's the God, as we humble ourselves, as we think of clothing ourselves with this humility and being this way to one another in imitation of Christ, this is the mighty hand we're to think of.

How does that help us humble ourselves? Well, it's got to smash our pride. When we think of God's hand versus our ability, consider that a moment.

If you were in Egypt, where the mighty hand takes our minds back to, if you were in Egypt, what would you do against Egypt?

I hear silence. That's right. You could do nothing, and yet it's God's mighty hand who did everything, did it all, and drew the people out.

And it's that same mighty hand that we are to humble ourselves under, to consider that mighty hand.

What's the greatest deed that that mighty hand of God ever did? Some might think, well, he created the world, or he healed this person over here, or he raised the dead through Jesus.

No, he raised Jesus. The resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, that mighty hand, that working of his might and power, as you read in Ephesians chapter one, that is the hand under which we are to humble ourselves.

And if we think of the might of that hand, and just how powerful

God is, and what he has actually done, we should only be able to humble ourselves, as Israel should have been humbled under that mighty hand, seeing that nation crushed on their behalf, a nation against whom they could do nothing but slave year after decade after century.

430 years they were there and could do nothing until God's mighty hand. This is the mighty hand under which we must humble ourselves.

And it should be a fairly easy thing for a believer to do, to read the histories of what God has done, and to consider, well, how much of that could

I have accomplished? It's really that simple. That's God's mighty hand, and that's why he says, humble yourselves to each other, because we're all in that same boat.

We all have this common lack of ability that is here spoken of by the apostle

Peter. So humble yourselves, therefore, because God will oppose you. God's in battle array, that for.

Because of that, humble yourselves under God's mighty hand. At the proper time, he may exalt you.

We have this throughout scripture. Exaltation comes from humility. Jesus said to the apostles, you remember that when the disciples, we read in Matthew and Mark, they were arguing about who's gonna be first, who's going to be greatest?

John and his brother go to Jesus and say, hey, we want to sit on your right hand and left hand.

We want to be in heaven with you. We want to be on thrones on your side. And what does Jesus answer?

It's not yours to have. You cannot bear this cross and all that. But he says, importantly, you want to be first?

You want to get in line first? You want to see your pride really crushed? You have to be last.

You have to be like Jesus, who was the first, who is God's only begotten, who is God in the flesh on earth, who put on that robe, that towel, and became a servant.

You want to be first? You have to be last. For the last will be first and the first will be last.

And we have these antinomies throughout scripture. And Peter says it right here, and I think it's just because he was in Jesus' presence and heard this with his own ears when

Jesus spoke this way. Why do you humble yourselves? Therefore, because otherwise you stand in opposition to God, or better said,

God in opposition to you. You humble yourself for that reason. At the proper time, he will exalt you.

He will lift you up. For God does lift up the humble. And what does he do with the proud?

He casts them aside. You see, the opposite of humility is pride and vice versa.

Casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you. Casting all your anxieties.

Now unfortunately, our ESV has anxieties. And that's a plural, of course.

And that makes it sound as if you take everything you're anxious about, all these circumstances, and you cast them upon the

Lord. It's really a singular in the original language.

And the NIV and the King James get this better, where he says cast all your care, or all your anxiety, not anxieties, but anxiety on him.

Because he cares for you. And here we come to what it means to be humble.

How this humility actually plays out is to take our anxiety and cast it upon him.

The reason the singular is important here is because it has to do with a situation.

It's not a blunderbuss where you're shooting at everything and you have these pellets scattering all over the place and you don't really know where they're going.

It's just I feel anxious and I have all these things going on. That's really not what the apostle

Peter has in mind here. Cast your anxiety about that situation upon him.

Why? Because he cares for you. So after the battle of Ray, he cares for you.

And I want to put these two together for a moment. So you see the kindness and the graciousness of God.

He cares for you, but he's opposing you up here. He opposes the proud.

Why does he oppose the proud? Why does he, how does he care for you? He opposes the proud because pride is antithetical to knowledge of Jesus Christ in the gospel.

The gospel itself is a pride crusher. But the opposition that God gives us is for our good.

It's for our good. He does care for you. The word care and anxiety are cognates of each other.

He does care for you and that's why he opposes you. Now we can think back to Genesis chapter three.

After Adam and Eve fell from grace and went into sin and brought sin and death into the world, what did

God do? He opposed them. Think of how he did this. He cast them out of the garden.

And lest they should come back, as any of us would have wanted to, and we can think that they would have wanted to go back to that wonderful place, lest they go back there and eat from the tree of life and live with their sin never resolved for their good, what did he do?

He opposed them. He put that cherubim with the flaming sword. He said, no, you will not enter back here.

And because that cherubim was there with that flaming sword and that awesome picture of God protecting them from reentering, it tells me they would have wanted to.

God opposed that for their good. And God often opposes our path for our good.

And it's not so much that he keeps you from getting in his way, he gets us out of our own way.

You see, he stands opposed to these paths that are gonna lead to pride, to a lack of humility, to not being in the

Lord and humble before each other. He opposes that kind of a path. Sometimes the worst thing that could happen to us is what?

That we go down the wrong path, that we make a wrong decision, we make a firm decision based upon bad data or a bad analysis of data, we put it all together in our pride, and what's the worst thing that could then happen to us?

It works. And then all of a sudden, we think, hey, we've got this. I understand how things work.

I can make it happen. It becomes me, me, me. God opposes that kind of pride. God gets in your way.

I could spend a lot of time testifying to you the times he's gotten in my way and not allowed a path.

And I look back after all these years and I say, had I gone down that path, it probably would have quote, unquote, worked.

And what would that have done for me? Well, I might have had a little bit more money in my checking account, might have had a little bit newer car.

All these nice things could have happened. A bad thing would have happened though. Pride, self -sufficiency.

Well, all that to say, cast your anxiety upon him, what your situation is, the thing that you're hoping for, the thing that you dread.

He says, cast your anxiety upon him. Notice it's not the situation.

Now, the situation is covered by God's word. God's word is complete. It answers all our questions.

We can look there and find the answer to the best way to deal with any situation.

But what do we cast upon God? The situation, no. There's no guarantee he's going to fix that.

We may have to go through that. We may have to glorify him by suffering through situations that the world brings upon us.

What do we cast upon him? What do we throw upon him? This thing that we keep.

This storehouse, this vault, the whole thing comes away from us and we cast it, we throw it upon Jesus Christ.

This is what casting is. It's a final decision. It's a final act, a definitive act of taking and throwing.

You know, it makes me think, when I think of casting or throwing, as this word means, I think of when we used to play catch.

You know what my brother used to do, just to bug me, is he'd throw it back and forth with me. I'd be able to catch a few times.

I was a lot younger than him, so it was kind of hard. And he'd get tired of it, and I'd throw him the ball, he'd catch it, and he'd keep it.

He'd run away with it. And it would make me cry, I'd get so mad. I wanted to play catch. Well, Jesus doesn't give it back.

But he's not like my brother. He's not supposed to give it back. We cast this upon him, it's a definitive act, and it's his, and it's his because he cares for you.

Can you do this? Can you take the anxiety and cast it upon him? What does that actually look like?

What does that really mean, to take this anxiety from within and put it on him? To throw it, to cast, to just get rid of it, like garbage in the house.

Just be done with it. What does that look like? Well, it's prayer.

It's the safety of many counselors. It's talking to others who've been in situations like yours and seeing how they've handled it.

It's coming to brothers and sisters, elders, pastors, and finding how scripture would tell you to address the situation.

But then looking within and saying, do I have an anxious heart about this thing?

What is anxiety? Anxiety is concerned about tomorrow, but it goes beyond that. See, it's like Peter said, or excuse me,

Paul says about hope. If one has what they're hoping for, then they stop hoping for it.

We hope in Jesus Christ. When we see him, hope is done with. Why? Because we'll have him. Anxiety is something like that because anxiety is not knowing what tomorrow is going to have, not knowing how this thing is going to work out, and wanting to know, and forcing the issue, and making it turn out my way is usually how we do it.

What is anxiety? That's what Jesus says. You don't know what tomorrow will bring. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble, said the

Lord Jesus Christ. You can't make a single hair on your head stop growing gray or stop falling out.

You can't do anything with any of these things. You can't increase your stature or one year to your life.

All these things, but they're in God's hands. Jesus didn't say they don't matter. Paul doesn't say they don't matter.

Peter here doesn't say they don't matter. He says they're under the mighty hand of God. Humble yourself under that.

Whatever the situation is, if I'm hoping to do better in the stock market, if I'm looking at something awful like my house burning down, what is anxiety?

It's knowing the end of it, and if you knew for sure the end, even if it was a bad thing, a sickness, something going wrong in a relationship, a disaster in your house like a house fire.

In 1971, our house burned down. We had to move. If you knew what the end of it was, whether it was a positive or negative result in your estimation, whether the house goes down to ashes, but you knew when the fire started what the end would be, you wouldn't be anxious about it anymore.

And this is what anxiety is, it's wanting to know tomorrow. Peter says cast that upon Jesus, on him, because he cares for you.

It's prayer, it's counsel, it's studying the scripture to find the answer to the situation that is making you anxious.

It's faith. It's faith knowing that Jesus Christ cares for you, and that this anxiety you have is undue, it's unwarranted, because Jesus Christ has saved you.

Because Jesus Christ has done the ultimate, which is to save you from your sin, save you from the wrath of God.

What are we anxious about? What keeps us up at night? Last Sunday afternoon,

Pastor Conley preached from Hebrews 2 about how Jesus has destroyed the works of the devil, who kept us in bondage over our fear of death.

There's something to be anxious about. I'm going to die. Do you know when?

Of course not. Do I know? Only Jesus knows when. Not being anxious is a great exercise in faith.

It's knowing that Jesus Christ is for us. Romans chapter eight, he who gave his only son, how will he not also in him give us all things?

If he gave us Jesus Christ, what then will he withhold from us? If he gave us the Lord Jesus Christ, who died on the cross and was raised on the third day, if God would do that for the likes of you and me, then what is there to be anxious about?

Now, it's not that we don't care about tomorrow. We only know, though, that God gave us today.

What do we know about tomorrow? Tomorrow is going to be Monday. Tonight, the moon's going to go down, the sun's going to come up in the morning on Monday, and it'll be

Monday. If we believe KPIX weather, it's going to be hot. Do we know that?

Sort of know with a small K, yeah, we know that. We can count on that. The chances are, the odds are, but in the scriptural sense, as disciples of the

Lord Jesus Christ, do we know that? Because the Lord Jesus Christ is at hand.

His return is imminent. Am I predicting? Of course not. We would never even touch that in this place.

But we live knowing he will return at a moment that we don't know. God's going to send him, and if that be the case, and if we know that when he returns, we will see him, we will be like him, for we shall see him as he is, and we will be then in glory with him, worshiping at his feet forever and ever and ever.

If we know that, with a capital K, because the scripture tells us that by faith we believe it, if we know that, what is there to be anxious about?

The other thing we need to understand about anxiety, as we have it here, anxiety is pride.

Anxiety is pride, and this is what the apostle Peter says. He says, clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud.

God opposes who? Those who refuse to show humility to one another. Those who will not be clothed with humility,

God opposes them. But he gives grace to the humble. We've talked about that a moment ago.

Humble yourselves, therefore, into the mighty hand of God, so at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxiety upon him.

Do you see the tie -in? Do you see the relationship between humility and anxiety?

Sometimes we're anxious and we say, well, I'm only worried about things that I should be worried about. That's not what this says.

This says that when you humble yourselves, you're no longer anxious, and anxiety, then, is the opposite of humility, which means that as the opposite of humility is pride, so the opposite of anxiety, or excuse me, anxiety, then, is also pride.

Does that give you a little different viewpoint of what that is? Why we need to cast it away, why we need to be done with it, why we need to trust

God because he cares for us? Be sober -minded, be watchful, and let us see here the other side of what

God is protecting us from. It says you need to be humble because if you're not humble, God stands in battle array against you.

Well, not he personally. He doesn't need to do that. He just needs to think and would throw it all over. It was a picture of God's intense concern and care for us, that he would put this flanks of spears before us so that we can't get through it.

As I said, usually keeping us from our own path, but here he says, in verse eight, the adversary of the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.

What does that have to do with it? How do you get devoured? How do you make yourself vulnerable? By thinking that you can make yourself invulnerable, by exercising your pride, by living anxious about tomorrow as though tomorrow doesn't have enough trouble of its own that only

God knows. My anxiety says, I can do something about it.

I'm anxious about it because I don't trust God in it. So if God is stopping us on that path, then that pride leads us somewhere else.

That pride is another danger. That pride then leads us to being vulnerable to this roaring lion trying to devour us.

And your greatest vulnerability is pride. Anxiety then is pride.

We get rid of that because with that in us, we're opposed by God and with that in us, we're vulnerable to the devil himself.

And that is his point here. He prowls around like that roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Well, here's

Peter's point about your anxiety. The situation may not be taken from you.

Why would God who cares for you leave you in a hard situation? The finances collapsing, with a marriage that's falling apart, with health that's deteriorating.

Why would he leave you in that situation? For his glory, for his good, for the good of his name work through us.

Because as Jesus told the apostle Paul that in our weakness, his strength is made perfect.

Well, it's not easy to be a vessel that shows the grace of God, his strength being made perfect because of our weakness.

As most all of you know, I have multiple sclerosis. You can get tired of being a vessel of God's grace.

And yet by faith, we know it's for our good, whatever you're going through. Be it relationships that you have that are falling apart, relationships that you desire that have not yet come to be, whether it's your finances, your job, any of those.

Peter doesn't say here that God doesn't care about the situation. He does. Jesus says, your heavenly father knows you have need of all these things.

Therefore, pray to him. And as we pray, cast anxiety upon him. If we really pray, if when we pray, we know we are truly speaking to God by the intercession of Jesus Christ who died for your sins.

If we really know that, anxiety has to be lifted from us and brought to Christ.

Peter's imagery of casting is a little more active than that. It's like the baseball pitcher who throws the ball, where did it go now?

110 miles an hour, what are they throwing it at? Anybody know? Anybody follow baseball? How fast they throw that ball, is it 100?

I think it's about that fast. Peter's image is more like that. Just getting rid of this thing. Just being athletic about it.

Pick it up, grab it, get a grip on it, and throw it. And prayer could usually be a little more gentle than that.

But prayer is how we really do cast these anxieties upon Christ. What does this look like?

Does it look like a sudden healed marriage? A sudden increase in my savings for retirement?

It's the peace that passes all understanding. It's knowing that God who cares for you does indeed care for you.

And as we go to him in humility, casting this anxiety, he by his spirit takes it from us.

And he does that because he cares. Has God ever blocked you from a path that you were on? Have you ever looked back and said, well, that was

God opposed to me? Not to keep me from his way, but to keep me out of my own way.

And then to put me back on the right path as I humbly submit myself to him. Anxiety, you know, when we keep it, it's always there in reserve.

It's always ready to be taken out and to be used. We can always be anxious. You can show it or not show it, but if it's there, it's pride.

Anxiety, who does it belong to? Where should it go? It's Jesus.

Says cast it upon him. And why? Because he cares for you. And how does he care for you?

He blocks that path of pride. He blocks those successes you might have.

Even if they're successes that would otherwise be good. Because if you go down that wrong path, if you go down that path of self -sufficiency, if you go down that path that is because you're anxious about this, therefore you grabbed yourself by the bootstraps, as they say, and you took care of it and you succeeded, just increases that distance that we have from the true humility that we need to have in order to cast the anxiety upon Christ.

He may well let your retirement savings grow. He may well heal your marriage.

But it's the anxiety that is the humility killer.

It's the anxiety that we hang on to that we need to be rid of. Peter says it belongs to Jesus.

We need to look to ourselves and say, how much of that have I carried? How much of that do I have in reserve?

How do I do this anxiety? How does this play out in my life? Those are personal things.

I know this, from the scripture, that if you would confess your anxiety, which is pride, if you would ask

God for a humble spirit to make you more like Jesus Christ, which is your predestined will, according to Romans chapter eight, to be conformed to the image of Christ Jesus our

Lord, Jesus Christ himself said, anything you ask in my name, that I will do.

And there's nothing better we can ask in his name than to kill our pride, to take away our anxiety, and to make us humble like our

Lord Jesus Christ toward one another, and most especially toward him as we live on this terrestrial globe with all the cares, with all the things that come upon us, knowing

God cares for the situations, and tells you this, that the anxiety is not yours.

Give it where it belongs. Cast it upon Christ Jesus our Savior, amen? Heavenly Father, thank you for this day.

I thank you for this time that we have together to worship the Lord Jesus Christ. It is for the goodness of God, knowing that you care for us.

Father, calm our anxious hearts. Make us those who, in all humility, cast aside anxiety and the pride, thinking we can do things and we can accomplish, and leave it all in your hands,

Father, as you guide us, as you direct us, as those things that we do would actually bring glory to your name because we do them in the power of the

Spirit and according to your word. Father God, make us that humble people who would be able to accomplish this for the glory of Christ Jesus our