Prayer is the antidote of worry

Philippians 4:6-7 (NIV)

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.                                        

This verse reminds me of some of life’s truisms like “To err is human”, “Life begins at 40”, “The early bird gets the worm” and so forth.  There also are hundreds of funny truisms like “Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it”,  “For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism”,  “No one is listening until you make a mistake”,  “the severity of the itch is proportional to the reach”, and “If at first you don't succeed, then sky-diving definitely isn't for you!”

Truisms are brief, sometimes funny, timeless truths that very few would dispute yet don’t take them seriously.  This passage from Philippians is an example of a truism.  Everyone on the surface would agree that you shouldn’t worry and instead you should pray, yet most people worry and few people pray and experience the true peace of God.  Pastor Jim preached that you are to stop worrying as you tend to blow things out of proportion, but by the time you read this a couple of days or more after his sermon, you have worried about many things!  You know what are the right things to do, yet you don’t do them!  Why?

Why do people worry so much?  Worry is a coping mechanism, but worry is not from the Lord.  If you are worried about something, if you are anxious about anything, you are not trusting the Lord.  That’s why this verse contains the counter---don’t be anxious, but do pray.  Prayer is relinquishing your anxiety to the Lord.  We all intellectually understand this truth, yet for some reason, we still worry too much and worry much more than we pray. 

Have you ever noticed that people who suffer the most worry less than those who suffer little?  Have you not interacted with someone who is experiencing or has experienced lots of troubles, yet they seem less worried than you?  Why is that?  Perhaps the major reason is that people who suffer most also pray the most.  Prayer is the antidote of worry.

Most worrying results from circumstances over which we have no control.  Think about it---what do you worry about the most?  Death, illness, loss, aging, what other people think, actions of family members, finances, failure, etc.  What is common about all of these worries?  There’s little or nothing that you can do about them, they are out of your control.  So why spend excessive or even a little time worrying about what you cannot control?  Instead give over these worries and anxieties to the Lord through prayer and claim the promise He makes that by doing this, you will experience His peace that you will not even begin to understand or explain.     

“When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.” -- Winston Churchill