We spent five weeks focusing on how followers of Christ were expected to respond leading up to the election and after the election. There were many worries across the political spectrum and many of those worries did not end once the election was over.

We all worry. We worry about health, jobs, family, friends, the economy, the community, the country, etc. That can be healthy worry which has an appropriate amount of concern about something we consider uncertain. Healthy worry keeps alert, engaged, and focused. Healthy worry may be what got many of us through school.

But healthy worry hasn’t been the type of worrying many of people have been doing for the past dozen years or more. Healthy worry isn’t the type of worrying Jesus addresses in today’s text. Jesus uses a very specific Greek word that means to have a disproportionate level of concern based on an inappropriate level of fear. In other words, unhealthy worry. To get more specific, Jesus is talking about anxiety.

Anxiety often begins as worry that gets tunnel vision and focuses on all that is wrong and can go wrong. It moves from logical concern to irrational worry. Instead of heightening our awareness and focus, it paralyzes us.

The root sources of the problem of unhealthy worry are two things:
God’s goodness and our worthiness. These two root sources of unhealthy worry can be represented by food (God’s goodness) and clothing (our worthiness).

The Bible uses food worries to highlight humanity’s worries about whether God’s goodness can be trusted. Another illustration is in the feeding of the 5,000 in Matthew 14. The disciples want to send the people away because there is not enough food or financial resources to provide food for the people. They are literally standing in front of the Son of God. They have seen him perform miracles, and they are worried about whether they can trust in God’s goodness. Eight chapters earlier, they heard him say, “Do not worry about what you will eat or drink.”