The Couldbes & The Shouldabens (Conclusions)

What should we take away from a systematic study of worry?

1. We must understand that worry is idolatry.
2. We must align our theology and anthropology with that of the bible’s.
3. We must realize that God is sovereign over our trials and our suffering.
4. We must combat worry with the faithful promises of God in the gospel.
5. We must believe that God is faithful & just to forgive those who worry.
6. We must know that future hope can only be found in a promise of resurrection.
7. We must find joy in our salvation (justification, sanctification, and glorification) because it is a means in God’s plan to glorify Himself.

By the recommendation of a friend, and before I recapitulate all that we have covered so far regarding the topic of worry, I want to address several Proverbs that deal well with it:

Proverb 12:
24 The hand of the diligent will rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labor. 25 Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad.

Though it is not a promise, it is a biblical principle which bears testimony to what we already know is the reality of our experience, that God uses our diligent work as a means to any prosperity that He sees fit to hand out. We know that God does not profit all work, yet work nonetheless is commanded. So the work of biblical prudence, the planning in which we must involve ourselves so we are able to be good stewards over the resources and relationships with which God has blessed us is not what we must avoid but rather, we must avoid the trouble caused by attempting those things in the flesh. Yes we must plan, but brothers make your plans with a mind full of God's precious Words, so as not to offend His holiness by idolatry.

Proverbs 15:
13 A joyful heart makes a cheerful face, but when the heart is sad, the spirit is broken. (NASB)

We can often tell when we encounter a person who is joyful, they just seem to wear it on their face. I pray that this would be the case in my life, and that my joy in the resurrection of Christ and my future resurrection would be contagious to others and a source of good council.

1. As I stated earlier, Matthew 6:25-34 is sufficient proof to call worry idolatry, but while it is one thing to be graced with this realization, it is yet another gracious provision to discern the difference between the temptation to worry and the act of worry from the need to plan and scheme, in other words, by God's grace we must distinguish biblical prudence (as one of my friends has put it) from worry. We must also heed the possible dangers we face if we fail to consider worry a sin. If we deny it, then when we are on the brink of it we will not attack it's closeness as a temptation to offend God by relying on our native resources as sufficient to remedy our situation. This is likely to lead us into other sins such as anger and undue frustration caused by attempting to accomplish our goals in the flesh. And if we do not attack worry as sin we may even suffer from it physically through headaches, stomach ailments and the like. Lastly, but most importantly, as with all sin that is ignored in our lives, if we do not identify worry as idolatry then we offend the holiness of God by trying to take His place. We cannot take such an offence lightly, but we must mortify the sin of worry, yes the sin of idolatry in our lives.

2. Even the children of God are still capable of sin, and the sin of worry/idolatry causes us to consider ourselves as more than we are and to consider God as less than He is. Worry is often that place to which we are taken by our residual, self reliance and self confidence; practically speaking we act as atheists; we replace the All Mighty God, Creator of heaven and earth who is capable of creating both light and calamity, with ourselves as the authority over past present and future things that concern our well-being. This is neither right nor profitable, for Proverbs 3:5-6 say, "Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths."

3. Unless our point of view is skewed by some aberrant view of God’s omniscience, or His holiness or His ability to do all that His holy will pleases to do, God's children will glory in, and find hope in the fact that He does work all things together for our good, and that good spoken of here is the Christ likeness He has as a goal for our lives so that His glory is manifest through us in the world. When we are meditating on our possible pain and suffering, past offences against us, and our unknown future outside of the context of the precious truth of God’s sovereignty over those things and His intent on using those things to make us more like Christ and to cause us to hope all the more in the future resurrection that is ours, then we are worrying. Worry is that time we spend concentrating on things over which we have no control; concentrating on those couldbes or shouldabens, or things that didn’t happen as we had hoped or fear that things will not turn out as we had hoped, with the intent of changing them anyway, in spite of the plans our Heavenly Father might have to use them for our sanctification. Most of us tend to sinfully ponder these things, vainly convinced, largely due to our lack of faith, that we are far more capable of handling them than is our Heavenly Father. We fail on those occasions to know the sovereignty of God and our dependence on Him for the very air we breath, thus we forsake the promises of God for the fading promises of this world and for the lies we can sometimes tell ourselves.

4. Christ Jesus has been raised from the dead so that our faith and hope are in God and not in ourselves, for who can raise themselves from the dead? Our hope certainly is in what we do not yet see, for it is an eschatological hope—a hope that is yet future. But it is not an irrational hope that is void of substance, no, it is a hope founded on the events of the past—the work of God in time to redeem creatures and creation. The aim of God the Father in Christ the Son was not merely to absolve our sins, but more so to adopt us as sons, and as which we are counted when we are placed "in Christ". And if in Christ, then heirs of the promise, and if heirs of the promise, then heirs of the hope and glory of resurrection! How is that for quenching the thirst of worry?

5. 1 John 1:9
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Just as with all sins, God if faithful and just to forgive His children of their idolatry even when it manifests itself in the form of worry, but we must identify it as such. We must train ourselves to recognize the times: when we are focusing on what might happen and instead of trusting God to glorify Himself through enacting His perfect plan in our lives so we can find our joy in His sovereign control and provision, or when we are focusing on what did happen and wishing in vain that we could change the past; go back and do or say something different. In these cases we either think we are better than God at planning our future or think that we could have planned it better than He did. Either way, we are idolaters trying to usurp the All Mighty God. When we see these sins in our lives by God's sanctifying grace, we need to confess them to our Father, He will forgive us--He promised that He would! At that point we need to meditate on the gospel, that Christ is The Righteous One--Mediator between God and man, the High Priest of our atonement, The Sacrificial Lamb; He lived a life without sinful worry because I couldn't, and He paid for my worry on Calvary's bloody tree.

I believe that as we practice seeking out these temptations to sin in this way, and as we confess the times that we actually do sin this way, that we will by God's grace become more aware of the temptations and we will eventualy be more able to distinguish them from the biblical prudence we are commanded to have, thus we will be mortifying the flesh, and finding our joy in God and not in our ability to plan and to scheme, because we will be trusting the Sovereign as He rules His universe as its King.

6. Don’t look to Abraham to see how to live a faithful life, but look to Abraham to see how God was faithful to him. As I quoted Bunyan earlier, he wrote, “Through His sorrow I have rest, and through His death I have life.” The truths of imputation and substitution in the gospel are both, used to justify and to sanctify. Faith of course is the means by which the foundation of our justification, which is Christ’s merit, is applied, and the words of God are the instruments of Faith. These truths are instruments in the hands of All Mighty God which He uses to draw His children closer to Himself when we face times of worry; we must fight our temptation by building up the defenses of our minds with such truths so to protect against the fire of the Devil’s trebuchet during trials which lay siege to our faith. These defences are found in the truths of the gospel itself, that we are justified by grace alone, through faith in Christ alone, and that our hope in the resurrection is paramount!

7. God surely does glorify Himself as He imputes Christ's righteousness to the account of a dead sinner, and as He separates that sinner out to holiness, and even in His eventual glorification of that sinner because in doing those things He has done what no one can do: He has obeyed the law as our sacrifice, He has applied the blood to the unworthy as their priest, and He presently lives in glory, ruling as our King of Heaven and Earth doing all that He is pleased to do. But He is doubly glorified in our salvation because those He has saved will find joy in their justification, and in their sanctification, expressing that joy in the world and eventual they will find ultimate and everlasting joy, having all their desires perfectly filled in the glory of resurrection...we truly need nothing more than the gospel to absolve us of our worry, yet we will sometimes find ourselves trusting in the false faithfulness of lesser things, and even then, we can find the absolution of that sin in the gospel as well.