Anxiety: What is Our Hope?

It is hard to talk about anxiety in a helpful way. At best, I have a shallow, half-understanding of anxiety. I am not a psychologist, and I no longer have the absolute confidence of a person who has only known one story of anxiety up close. A flat, simple story of anxiety is easy to talk about. Sad thing is, the story of anxiety gets more complex with every real person you engage with.

Discussion around anxiety is everywhere. In his recent book, The Anxious Generation, New York University professor Jonathan Haidt offers an interpretation of the overwhelming reports of massive anxiety among teenagers and young people by focusing on the destructive impact of smartphones and social media on childhood.

Lauren Oyler, a young novelist, offers a perspective from within the anxious generation. She wrote an essay in the New Yorker in March 2024 about her own experience of anxiety and uncertainty about the kind of help she might or might not need. It’s a good read if you want to hear someone’s experience of trying to talk about her own anxiety in the context of a cultural deluge. And she points out that we are not the first people to experience a huge uptick in reports of anxiety as we see the world changing around us:

The concept of Americanitis, popularized by William James at the end of the nineteenth century, described “the high-strung, nervous, active temperament of the American people,” according to an 1898 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The causes — advances in technology and accompanying pressures of capitalism — were much the same as they are today.[1]

Please do not think I am minimizing anxiety. I am grateful that it is way less stigmatized than even a decade ago and that good therapy and effective medications are far more widely available. Good people are doing good work to help people in real suffering.

But, or even better said, and whenever we’re faced with something that seems out of control in our current moment, we do well to look beyond our moment.

Jesus knows the anxiety of change. He taught people whose political worlds were defined by hostile occupation, economic volatility, and colonial pragmatism. Their daily lives were lives without refrigeration, without preservatives, without Ziploc^© bags. Each day, the question of where food was coming from was as live a question as whether the authorities would crack down on them. In the face of all these unknowns, how could they be anything but anxious?

Matthew 6:24-34 does not provide us with a silver bullet to the whole problem of anxiety. Jesus is not offering a simplistic “stop it!” to people whose brains and bodies play host to generalized anxiety or traumatic responses.

Instead, this passage must be read in context, and when we do, we will see that Jesus is focused on a key tension:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.  (Matt. 6:24-34, ESV)

Step back with me. The thesis that sets up this key tension is this: faced with anxiety about the future, we will be devoted to the one thing that truly gives us hope, and we will consider other sources of hope inconsequential. Jesus goes so far as to say that we will even come to despise them.

And here is the tension: What will that source of hope be? Ultimately, Jesus teaches, in the face of uncertainty, we will either devote ourselves to our own capacity to meet trouble, here represented by money, or we will devote ourselves to the conviction that God cares for us. We will either devote ourselves to our own capacity to meet trouble, primarily through money, but possibly also hustle, worry, politics, and more — power in our own hands — or we will devote ourselves to the conviction that God, our Father, cares for us. Power cradling us in his own hands.

It will almost never feel this black and white, but in those moments of interior crisis we will preach to ourselves one of two gospels: I am alone, or I am a child.

1. I am alone. If I anticipate and mitigate every crisis that tomorrow might bring, I may be able to take care of myself. I may be able to please the gods. I may be able to future-proof myself.
2. I am a child. I have a loving heavenly Father who has saved my life and will add to that all I need for each day.

It feels so binary, yet these are the two options everything else boils down to. Mitigating crises might not look like building our bank balance; it might look like surrounding ourselves with capable people who owe us favors or building our positive karma. These options go beyond action and back to identity. And fundamentally, they go back beyond our own identity to the identity of God himself. Does he exist? Does he care? Can he help?

So those are our two choices: Am I alone, or am I loved? Jesus asks us which narrative we will believe. But they are choices offered with a huge bias: come towards love. Jesus beckons us towards God’s love using three reminders.

First, we are to choose our heavenly Father over money.

We cannot begin to understand this text and this teaching without understanding the context. There are two instances of the word ‘therefore’ in this passage, and the first is almost at the beginning, in verse 25. This first ‘therefore’ is emphatic.  In fact, it is not the usual word for ‘therefore’: it is more like ‘hey!’ Because of all this, therefore…

The argument in the rest of the chapter only makes sense in the context of the division Jesus has just drawn in verse 24:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

The command about anxiety that comes later is part of a coherent argument that makes no sense without its context. Jesus is not talking about anxiety in general: he is talking about the specific anxiety that comes from making money or the resulting power over our circumstances into our functional god.

Jesus is stark about the problem: we have to make a choice. As I stated above, faced with anxiety about the future, we will be devoted to the one thing that truly gives us hope, and we will consider other sources of hope inconsequential. We will even despise them.

We have a choice, but not a choice between a faceless, superstitious theism and a practical, realistic concern for financial stability. That is not the choice here. The question is this: What is the opposite of anxiety? Is it “Let go and let God?”

Let me clear up the choice a little. We are not being asked to dissociate from trouble, to never plan, and to vaguely, irresponsibly say, ‘I trust God.’ There is a specific, active command that the person who says ‘I trust God’ is going to obey, and it is found in verse 33:

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

This is the opposite of anxiety: peace in our heavenly Father’s provision of our fundamental needs, peace that frees us to pursue the things we were made for, seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness. This is the opposite of anxiety.

The promise is not that everything will be fine no matter what. We know it’s not. We in the United States are wealthier than 99% of the world right now, and wealthier than pretty much everyone who ever lived before us. And yet we’re still living in the world where kids in Sudan are dying of hunger, and women are being beaten in their homes, and people die in natural disasters, and where we can have enormous wealth and still fall asleep and wake up with the fear that these beautiful things could be taken away.

The promise Jesus gives is that as we believe that we have a Father in heaven who loves us, we are free to orient our lives in the pursuit of his kingdom and righteousness, and he will provide for our true needs as we do. Spending our lives building reserves and contingencies won’t save us. When life spirals out of control, money won’t save us. When death comes, no policy can hold him down.

Do you want a life of unending worry? Bet on yourself. Let yourself do what he says: worship money and think little of God. See God as a backstop, an emergency measure you hope you never have to use. Put him in the trunk of your car and forget about him. Despise him.  And you will keep waking in the middle of the night.

Do you want a life of meaning, hope, and purpose? A life that is part of the kingdom that will last into eternity? A life of God’s Fatherly love and righteousness poured into you and out through you to a world in desperate need? Come to Jesus. And yes, you will lose some stuff. You will probably give much of it away and wonder what you might have had. But you will think little of that. You will find that your real needs are met, and that what you got to give away brought so much greater beauty, deeper comfort, and truer joy than if you had kept God’s gifts for yourself.

Choose your Father over money.

Now we get to the actual question Jesus asked. The question itself is obviously rhetorical: And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? Unlike some of Jesus’ questions, he’s not asking for reflection, but for realization. We have no control. Only your Father can provide for our needs.

The whole argument around this is rooted in the idea that God created us just like he created all things. If he takes care of all those lesser things, how could he not take care of us, his treasure?

We worry about food — the birds don’t. They are completely dependent. They have no fridge, no pantry, no grocery store, no homestead, no feed store. But they eat, sleep, fly, repeat. God provides each day for them. Do they have massive, deluxe aviaries? No. Are they fine? Yes. Do they glorify and enjoy God? Yes.

We worry about clothes — the flowers don’t. God invented beauty, and he pours it out all over the place. And he gave the first clothes to Adam and Eve in the moment of their deepest shame. Right in their disgrace, he provided. Even in your depths, he still provides.

Will he banish all trouble so we never need to wonder again where our hope will come from? Not yet. Verse 34 makes a promise we wish were not true: tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. But each day, he will give us what we need.

Sometimes I imagine my great-grandfather hearing this promise. I think his perception of his needs would be different than mine. He was an Italian immigrant who wouldn’t let his sons speak Italian, so they wouldn’t be rejected growing up in London. He was a cabinet maker who was building a business when his wife died and left him with two young sons. He became a struggling single father who almost lost his younger son when he got sick and the church tried to take him away. How would he hear this promise? What would he consider his needs to be?

Or I consider my old pastor in Burma hearing this promise. He ministers in a military dictatorship, having sent his three beloved sons overseas to escape conscription into the same army that has been killing their tribal people for 75 years. He faces spiraling inflation since all the foreign investment went out of the country. He lives with the loss of friends and family, having seen protestors executed in the street outside the church building, and having fought through tear gas to meet with those left after the exodus.

I know he believes this promise. I don’t know if my great-grandfather did. But whatever our circumstances, the question will always come up: Will God provide?

Has he provided each day until now? Can I leave meeting my needs to him, and seek first his kingdom and his righteousness?

Consider verse 33 a bit more: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” The word translated ‘added’ is the Greek word προστεθήσεται (prostethēsetai), the same word that we get our word ‘prosthetic’ from, like prosthetic limbs given to veterans who lost legs to IEDs.

Remember that sense of added, as we look at Jesus’s whole argument, encapsulated at the beginning and end of this passage, in verses 25 and 32-33:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?

…your heavenly Father knows that you need them all [food and clothing]. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

There will be times when God’s provision will feel like a prosthetic limb. We will testify to how he has preserved our lives. Do we wish we still had what we lost? Yes. But has he added to us in a way that, while we know the pain of loss, we can still walk? Has he given us things which, even though we grieve what has been taken, give us what we need to keep living, to keep hoping, to keep walking towards the vision of beauty and redemption that he has promised to us, and that he will never fail to bring?

Will he speak to us tenderly in loss and provide? Will he meet us in devastation, sling us on his back, carry us out of the smoke, nurse us back, and keep us with him until he renews our bodies, raises the dead, and makes all things new?

This is why we do not need to be anxious. Our God will carry us, nurse us, and bind up our wounds, even as we feel the loss, and he will get us to where he has promised. Now is not the whole story. But he is with us now, taking care of what he knows we need.

This is the kind of gospel that can meet our anxiety when we are widowed, when Parkinson’s comes, in redundancy, divorce, and heart attacks. Do not, Christian, do not be anxious. Not because there is nothing to fear, but because we have a Father, and day by day he will provide.

Our Father will provide what we need.  Why? Because he places such value on us. Look back at the images Jesus gave us in verses 26 and 30:

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?…

But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

Here is Jesus’ other contention. Money doesn’t care about us. But God values us tremendously. The things he loves a little, the birds, the grass, he lavishes good things on. The things he loves a lot, he spent his own blood on. Romans 8:32:

He whodid not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

The cross preaches to us the depth of God’s radical love and certain provision in the face of the harshest realities of life.

Come to Christ. He values us so much he laid down his life for us, then rose from the dead to smash fear and death. Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things — all these real, important things — will be added to you.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/my-anxiety