Word For Today

WORDS FOR LIFE - Word for Today

August 26, 2018

Matthew 6:34 (p. 679)

Introduction:

So I don’t believe in coincidences but I believe wholeheartedly in God-incidences! I’d been thinking about this message from Matthew 6:34 for a little while…and I got Chinese food for lunch…After I was through, I opened the cookie (my dog Buck loves them) and this is what I read…

SHOW PICTURE OF FORTUNE

“All you have is today - there is no such thing as yesterday or tomorrow.”

I’m not gonna live my life on the advice of a fortune cookie…or buy a lotto ticket to use the numbers on the other side, but I thought it was pretty cool to receive this on the same day I’d started to pray and think about Matthew 6:34 being Words for Our Life.

As you’ve already heard…this is what Jesus says, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of it’s own.”

I find it absolutely amazing when I get a fortune cookie which is in full agreement with Jesus!

The context of this teaching by Jesus is “Do not worry about your life…Don’t stress out about stuff.”

I remember when I was 34 and had my first heart attack…someone gave me this book by the author Richard Carlson, PHD…It was called, “Don’t sweat the small stuff…and it’s all small stuff.” It’s subtitle said, “Simple ways to keep the little things from taking over your life.”

And it was a really good book with some single insightful ways to deal with stress and worry.

It opened up with this statement:

“One of the mistakes many of us make is that we feel sorry for ourselves, or for others, thinking that life should be fair, or that someday it will be. It’s not and it won’t. When we make this mistake we tend to spend a lot of time wallowing and/or complaining about what’s wrong with life. “It’s not fair,” we complain, not realizing that, perhaps, it was never intended to be.”

“We live our lives as if they were one big emergency! We often rush around looking busy, trying to solve problems, but in reality, we are often compounding them.”

Our disappointment comes about in essentially two ways. When we’re experiencing pleasure we want it to last forever. It never does. Or when we’re experiencing pain, we want it to go away - now. It usually doesn’t. Unhappiness is the result of struggling against the natural flow of experience.”

Here’s the truth…stress and worry are two very real struggle for most of us, even very committed Christians…worry involves our thoughts and those thoughts become the catalysts that affect our emotions…stress.

All of us deal with stress on a daily level…whether it’s timelines for our job, trouble with our kids or grandkids, illness or a million other things that can affect our thoughts and emotions…but here’s a very real truth:

Before a violin can produce beautiful music, stress must be applied to the strings…but if you pull them too tightly they’ll snap.

Jesus gives us some amazing words for a life with the right balance…between the proper tension to play beautiful music for God’s glory or snapping.

His first word of instruction is…

I. TRUST GOD FOR TODAY

You can almost see Jesus smiling as He says, “Doesn’t today have enough trouble without borrowing tomorrow’s.”

[There was a woman who was terrified her home would be burglarized…Every single night she struggled with insomnia and worry. Even noise caused her to awaken her husband so he could check it out.

One night her husband heard a noise and went downstairs to surprise a burglar…the husband looks at the guy and says, “You’ve got to come upstairs and meet my wife. She’s been expecting you for 10 years.”

Corrie Ten Boom says, “Worry does not empty tomorrow of it’s sorrow, but it empties today of our strength.”

Worry is the tension Satan uses to tighten the strings of our life well past the healthy point.

In these 10 verses in Matthew 6…verses 25-34 Jesus uses the word “worry” 6 times…It’s the Greek word “Meteorizoma.”

It’s where we get the word for meteor…shooting stars.

Ancient astronomers observed that meteors weren’t located in outer space or in the earth’s inner atmosphere…weird huh? Why would Jesus choose a word like this? It literally means… “Caught in between…traveling as objects of midair.”

Meteorizoma figuratively describes what “worry” does to us. It leaves us hanging in midair…caught in the middle, suspended in space…instead of going somewhere…just wasting energy…until we crash into something…or someone.

What am I gonna eat? What am I gonna drink? What am I gonna wear? What am I going to do to fix this problem? How am I gonna pay that bill? How am I gonna fix this problem right now?!!