If Jesus Was Serious | Week 4 | (5-3-26)

Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches on the subject, "Nothing To Fear."

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Transcript

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Have you ever spiraled before? You might not know that's what it's called, but but I bet you might know exactly what I'm talking about. If you've ever uh spiraling, it's when you get worried about something or afraid of something, and that worry generates another worry, which then in turn generates another. And before long, it feels like you've been pulled completely under. Like a whirlpool dragging you to the bottom. I tell you, uh, when I first understood what a spiral was, was back before I was married. Back in the dating days, I was not great at courtship. Let me just say, it was not my expertise. And it wasn't because I wasn't romantic, it's because I was probably like too romantic, like in like the cheesiest way possible. Uh, but but I would find myself in like a constant state of stress that rose and fell completely dependent on the the time in which it took to respond to a text message. Because when I was dating, texting had just become a thing, right? It when when I when I first got to college, you were still paying like five cents a text message. So it was too expensive to try to court somebody via text. But eventually they dropped those limits, and so texting became more normal, and then it started being the way that we all communicate now. But in the beginning, uh I carried a lot of anxieties around uh somebody's response time. And so when Brianna, my wife and I were dating, um, I I would text her, I would think of like something kind of casual but cute, you know, and I'd text her to her, and I'd say something like uh, hey, uh, I was just thinking about you. And then I would wait. And if I didn't hear something back, immediately the spiral would begin. Maybe you've experienced this. I I would think, oh no, I shouldn't have said that. Uh, she thinks I'm weird. I need you to explain. And so then I'd send another message, right? Trying to explain why I said that, which of course made things worse. And then she still wouldn't respond. And I and the spiral then went even faster. She hates me. I've ruined this. I'm never gonna find anybody. And if I can't, I won't be able to serve a church because they won't trust anybody who can't find a wife, and so I'm gonna lose my job and I have to move back to Dothan and live with my parents and their five dogs, and I have to have a goldfish named Goldie that will be my only friend. Spiral, right? And then my phone would buzz, and so you say, Hey, sorry, I just saw this. I was asleep, it's 1 a.m. Why are you up? And instead of relief, you know, I I I would immediately pivot and I'd be like, Of course, I'm so dumb. Why would I text her so late? And then I would think, wait a minute, was she actually asleep? Because she's kind of a night owl. Was she out with somebody? Was it my best friend Tim? Why would Tim do this to me? I'm gonna have to get kicked, I'm gonna have to fight Tim. I'm gonna get kicked out of school for fighting Tim. I won't be able to get a job. I'll have to move back to Dothan. I live with my parents and their five dogs and my full goldfish Goldie, right? Like spirals spiral even more. One worry leads to another worry that leads to another worry. Until we've convinced ourselves of catastrophe. The worst possible solution is the most likely solution. You know, I eventually figured out uh the best way to stop those kinds of spirals is to not start them if you can prevent them. So Brianna and I, early in our relationship, realized like I can't handle text messages over serious things. So we made a rule serious things only happen in person, which saved me a lot of unnecessary suffering. But it didn't stop me worrying entirely about other things. I just found new material. Maybe you've done that. You stopped worrying in one area and you then moved it to a different. You know, on Monday, I went to Montgomery for a uh a continuing education event. It was a seminar about preaching, and it was specifically about humor in preaching. And funny enough, I bet we're all wondering the same thing. Why was I attending and not teaching it myself, right? Clearly, everybody else might want to gain from my wisdom, but but one of the things that I came back with, or that we talked about that I that I already believed, but just appreciated the conversation around, um, was this idea that sometimes uh there there's this truth that people might be afraid to say out loud. Uh sometimes the Bible is funny. Sometimes uh it occasionally it's because it's meant to be funny. There there are lines and there are stories that are supposed to engender humor. But often the Bible is humorous, not because the authors were trying to write humor, but because of the gap they open. Uh when you read certain verses at certain times in the right way, something in them can land like a joke. Today's text is one of those, right? We're in the middle of the series on the Sermon of the Mount, where we're asking, what if Jesus was serious about these things? And each week we've been asking, what if Jesus was serious when he said whether we're stalled in light? What if Jesus was serious when he said we should love our enemies? And today Jesus says this, and I want you to hear it. Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life. Did you hear that and think, oh yeah, okay, right, Jesus? I got it. Just don't worry. That's simple. The reason it's kind of funny is because it opens up for us a gap. The gap between what the text says and where we are. Every person in this room has tried not to worry. We've all told ourselves, calm down, it's fine. This is fine, it's gonna be fine. Our lives sometimes are like the meme of the dog with the house burning down all around it, saying, This is fine. We've heard somebody that we love say to you, hey, it's gonna be okay. But we've continued worrying anyway. The command, do not worry, sounds like something, uh it sounds like telling somebody who just stubbed their toe, hey, just don't feel that. Just it doesn't hurt. But Jesus keeps going, he says, Don't worry about what you're gonna eat or drink. Don't worry about your body or your clothes. And then this is where it gets kind of absurd. He he points to the birds and he says, Look at the birds in the air. They don't sow or reap or store up things, yet your heavenly father feeds them. And then he points to the wildflowers and he says, Solomon in all of the splendor, he wasn't dressed like this flower. There's this gap between the weight of what we carry and the lightness of the birds and the flowers. And the gap in this text is exactly where we find the humor and the truth. Because Jesus isn't dismissing worry, he's not saying that it life isn't hard. He's asking something deeper. He's asking, Do you really think that you are worth less than the birds or the flowers to God? And there's a word that opens this passage that I don't want us to skip over. It's important. It says, Therefore. The very first word of this text is therefore. It's just one word, but it's connecting this text with the text that came before it. Just two verses earlier, Jesus says, You can't serve two masters. You can't give your whole heart to God while you're giving part of it to something else. And he draws this straight line where he says, You can't serve two masters, and because you should trust in God fully, don't worry. The truth is, our spirals start, our worries are born when our allegiance is divided. When we say we trust God with our lives, but then when things get hard, or they're not exactly as we want them, when the news is bad, where do our hearts actually go? Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. What we say and what we do are not always aligned. And what we do reveals the truth. The truth is that most of us, a lot of the times, we worry because we have a divided heart. Worry is born in that gap between what we say we trust and where we run when things get tough. And none of this is new, right? This is not unique to us. I mean, Jesus is talking about worry 2,000 years ago. So worry's been around at least that long. And the things that cause worry are not unique to us. Sometimes we think, well, I'm the only person who's ever gone through what I'm going through. But food, clothes, tomorrow, the people that we love, they've always been right there to keep us up at night. We are not a uniquely anxious generation, but we are an anxious generation with better tools. Right? And some of those tools that we have at our disposal do extraordinary work at making things worse. That's the difference about this moment in history. There has always been worry, the Sermon on the Mount proves that, but we were the first people to carry worry devices in our pockets. Right? It is a remarkably efficient delivery system when the social media never stops, when the news never stops, the comparisons never stop, the worst case scenario, it's at a fingertip. The comment section. Have you ever been in a comment section and not been had worry be engendered into your life? All of it is available to us at any moment of any day. And when you're already prone to spiral, the world we live in is really good at exacerbating the problem. So sometimes it's posts on the internet. Other times, though, that worry is generated by things that are even more serious. I think about the experience I had a couple years ago. And as most of you know, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. And the worst part of the experience wasn't the surgery or the recovery. The worst part was the waiting. The waiting for the biopsy to come back. Will Bolton, who's in our church, my endocrinologist, you may know Will, he gave me every reason to feel okay about what was happening. And there were other people in my life that were saying things are very true and they meant well. And they say stuff like, well, if you're gonna have cancer, that's the one you're gonna want to have. And that's true. My cancer was a lot less serious than others, and what many of you have gone through. But in that moment, that's not what helps. Because when it's happening to you and you don't know how it's gonna go, the spiral doesn't respond to accurate information. I turn on the TV and there'd be a cancer story. I'd uh uh I turn on the news and there'd be something about cancer, and and the worst thing you can do, and I think all of you have experienced this at some point in your life, when you open up Google or WebMD, five minutes on that, and you will convince yourself that the worst possible outcome is the only outcome. All this was true too, back in the fall when Brianna was back in the hospital and we were navigating that, right? It's that same feeling, that same spiral, that worry that was generated from the unknowing. And here's what I want you to see. When I was waiting for those results, I knew all the right things. I had Will's assurances, I had people praying for me, I'd heard the gospel, I've been preaching it, I knew what I believed, but my heart had already gone somewhere else. Right? And that's the split that I think Jesus is naming in this passage. He's not naming weak faith or poor character, he's naming an honest description of where human hearts go when the weight is real. When things are easy, we can shout from the rooftops that that we know where our trust is, but our worries show us where our hearts actually are. And when we think about this text, we think about what Jesus, I'm glad Jesus doesn't say, just think more rationally, and then you'll be better, right? He doesn't promise an easy life, he doesn't deny the weight and the hardships that we go through. He actually says directly at the end of the passage that each day has enough trouble of its own, that you will carry heavy things. He's not selling us a better version of your current anxieties, he's trying to point us somewhere different. He's trying to help us see a completely new reality. He says this seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you as well. Now, I know that this can sound a bit like a church cliche. Seek first the kingdom, right? That that can sound like it belongs on a bumper sticker. So let me make it just a little more concrete. There's a moment in the the movie Frozen 2. And if you have young children or grandchildren, you've seen this, and you haven't, just trust me. There's a moment when Anna, one of the main characters, is in complete darkness in this cave, and she's lost everything and everyone she cares about. She can't see any way forward. She doesn't know where to go, she has no plan. And so she decides simply to just do the next right thing. That's actually the name of the song she sings, The Next Right Thing. It wasn't a full solution or a strategy that she has this mapped out. It was just one step forward. And I think that's a pretty good description of what seeking first the kingdom actually looks like. This is uh the practice that we can all actually put into place. You don't have to defeat worry by solving everything at once. In fact, rarely can you do that. If you can, that's great. Please teach the rest of us. But more often than not, you have to take the first step, and then the next step, and then the one after that. The birds and the flowers, they're not calm because winds don't blow them around. They just simply do exactly what they were made to do. And when our lives are oriented towards the kingdom, then the spirals find less room to pull us away from where we ought to be. So, what does that mean for us to orient our lives towards the kingdom? Well, the New Testament is actually pretty specific about this. It looks like this it looks like spending time in prayer, time in scripture, it looks like joining a group of people who are also trying to follow Jesus. It looks like showing up for worship this week and then showing up again next week. And I know those sound obvious. They might sound rope, they might sound trite. You probably heard those before, and I know you've heard me say it. But guess what? There's a reason or the church has been saying these things for 2,000 years. Because they're not magic. And it's not like they magically make everything disappear immediately, but they are how we orient ourselves towards the kingdom. They are how we take the next faithful step. If you're looking and asking, well, how do I follow Jesus? How do I not worry? These are the things that move our hearts back towards the one that we say we trust. It's like if you're trying to get fit, you can't get a six-pack after one workout. Trust me, I've tried, and I think you can tell it's not going so well. But but you know what? You can show up today. And then tomorrow, if you if you're trying to resolve the worry in your life, uh you can't fix a divided heart in a moment. But you can come back next week. You can start with that group. You can open the Bible tonight. And when you keep showing up, when you actually practice your faith day after day, you're not only heading in the right direction, uh, you're experiencing the kingdom each step of the way. The worst thing about worry is that it pulls us out of the present, out of what God is offering us right now. When I was waiting for that Bobsy, or whenever I was uh sitting with Brianna in the hospital, whenever I was lying awake at one o'clock worried about Tim stealing my girl. That, you know, it just it destroyed my present because it put me in a future that wasn't real. It made me go to a place where I could only imagine the worst things rather than looking at what was actually going on. Seek first the kingdom of God is among other things a return to the present, a return to what is actually happening right now and what we take for granted. Because the kingdom, as Jesus said, is at hand. It's available in the here and the now. You remember Andy Bernard, he has this funny line at the very last episode of The Office. If you ever watch that show, the very last episode, he looks back on his years at Dunder Mifflin, to the people, to the ordinariness of it all, to the small daily life of just being in that place. And he says, I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them. That line has stuck with me. He says it kind of like as a eulogy for the present that he missed, worrying about his future. Jesus is not offering us this way to look back fondly on the past, but a way to recognize what you have while you're standing in it. To be here in this moment with these people, to see what God is already providing and know that Christ is enough. But just to be honest, that doesn't mean it's easy. And it doesn't mean it's fast. There's no prescription that I can tell you will get you exactly where you think you need to be by the time you think you need to be there. But what I can say is that I'm better today than I was yesterday, and than I was a year ago. Not that the worries have gotten any smaller. I mean, y'all met my children, that worries hadn't gotten smaller. I mean, they're small humans, but like, y'all know, y'all bratch all the here in just a minute. But the practices that this faith produces allows us to look at our lives and realize that today has enough for itself, and that Christ is enough. And so as we end this morning, I know that every person in this room has some version of this. You felt that spiral, you felt the tug of that worry. Maybe it was because a text message didn't come back, or a job you weren't sure was going to be there, or the results that haven't arrived. Jesus looks at all of that. Jesus looks at you and he says, Look at the birds, look at the flowers. Do you really think that the God who's created all of those has forgotten about you? No. God will never forget you or abandon you. Knowing that and living that are two very different things, though. But that gap is where Christ wants to meet us exactly as we are. He's not waiting until you have no worries. He meets you exactly in the moment and says, Let me show you something better. Turns out that Frozen 2 had some pretty good theology in it. Anna didn't need to see the whole past, she just needed to take that next step. And it turns out that's exactly what Jesus has been describing this whole time. Each day has enough troubles of its own you don't have to solve tomorrow's. You just need to do the next right thing today. And so show up for prayer. Open your Bibles. Come to the table, return to this place, walk through the doors, be in a group, be here for worship. They're not small things dressed up as spiritual advice, but these are the steps that are going to take us to where we belong. The kingdom is already here. God is already present. The spirals want to pull us somewhere else into a future full of the worst case scenarios. But today, seek first the kingdom, see what gets added, and know that Christ is enough. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Will you pray with me?