SCRIPTURE: Matthew 6:25
(TM) – larger reading, Matthew 6:25-34
If you decide for
God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don't fuss about what's
on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion.
There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to
your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body.
STORY:
Connie Mack was one of the greatest managers in the history
of baseball. One of the secrets of his success was that he knew how to lead and
inspire men. He knew that people were individuals. Once, when his team had
clinched the pennant well before the season ended, he gave his two best
pitchers the last ten days off so that they could rest up for the World Series.
One pitcher spent his ten days off at the ballpark; the other went fishing.
Both performed brilliantly in the World Series. Mack never criticized a player
in front of anyone else. He learned to wait 24 hours before discussing mistakes
with players. Otherwise, he said, he dealt with the goofs too
emotionally.
In the first three years as a major league baseball manager,
Connie Mack's teams finished sixth, seventh, and eighth. He took the blame and
demoted himself to the minor leagues to give himself time to learn how to handle
men. When he came back to the major leagues again, he handled his players so
successfully that he developed the best teams the world had ever known up to
that time.
Mack had another secret of good management: he didn't worry.
"I discovered," he explained, "that worry was threatening to
wreck my career as a baseball manager. I saw how foolish it was and I forced
myself to get so busy preparing to win games that I had no time left to worry
over the ones that were already lost. You can't grind grain with water that has
already gone down the creek."
OBSERVATION:
Not sure who said it, but it is one of favorite quotes: Worry
Is Like Interest Paid In Advance On A Debt That Never Comes Due. And there it is in a nutshell … why
worry about something that we cannot do anything about?
But here we are
allowing worry to consume our energy, our brilliant minds, our spirit, our
time, our present and future – in other words, everything that we are or ever
hope to be.
Not sure where it
falls on the top 10 list of emotional and psychological issues that destroys
our being, but my guess it is near the top. Usually when this subject is
included in a sermon someone will respond with, “Preacher, you are preaching to
the choir.”
We all know that
we shouldn’t worry, but we do. We all know that our trust for today and
tomorrow should be placed with God, but we still hold back a little for
ourselves to carry around. We all know that worry can destroy our trusting
relationship with God, but there it still remains anyway. We know what we
should be doing and how we should be living, but at every turn in our life we
confront the reality of the worry which consumes us.
Does this mean
that we don’t trust God? Not really. Does this mean that our faith isn’t strong
enough? Probably not. Does this mean that our faith is weak? Well, maybe. As
the old farmer once prayed, “Well, God it’s just me, old Joe, again. I hate to
bother you with my problems because you are so busy running the world and all,
but I cannot get my mind off of this particular problem. I would really
appreciate you taking care of it for me. I’ll try to take care of all my other
problems if-in you take care this biggin for me. Thanks. Well, that is all. I
be talkin’ with you soon.”
Maybe old Joe is
correct … we just don’t want to bother God with our problems. But maybe old
Joe’s wife, Sally, has a better approach. She has a worry box on which she has
written “Wednesday” which is her “worry day”. Whenever something that comes up
on which she feels she needs to worry she just writes it down on a slip of
paper and places it in her worry box to be dealt with on Wednesday. When
Wednesday rolls around. She sits down with her Bible and pours out all of those
slips of paper. Much to her surprise most of them have already been answered
and those that were not she just places them back in her Worry Box until next
Wednesday.
PRAYER:
Yes Lord, it is just us again with the same list of worries
that we shared with you yesterday and the day before that and the day before
that. We’re still carrying them around even though we asked you to do something
about them. We don’t mean to say that we don’t trust you and all, but the
burden of life just weighs us down. Please free our spirit from these burdens
so that we can begin to live like you want us to live. O.K.? O.K.!
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