Faith and anxiety are opposites. How do we stop feeling anxious and start trusting the Lord? We start by focusing on the person of God and all his attributes. If a person cannot sleep because he is kept awake by a storm and is worried that the house he is in is in danger of collapsing, it will help him greatly to remember the depth of the foundations, the size of the timbers which form the walls and roof, and how carefully the labourers constructed the building, tightening every bolt and hammering home every nail. It is thinking through these things that will convince him that anxiety is a waste of time and that this house is never going to be moved by such a storm. The Christian must think carefully about the strength of the Lord. When has the Lord ever faced anything that was more than he could cope with? When has he ever been outsmarted by the devil? How could he who owns every beast of the forest, the cattle on a thousand hills, the birds of the mountains and the wild beasts of the field, be in short supply? He feeds them every day and organises a feast for them that we cannot calculate and play no part in supplying. How many things God does that we are scarcely aware of? Far from being unreasoning and unthinking, faith is careful to consider all these things. Faith reasons from character and from past records. It says, character is stable and does not change for no reason; I know that what God has done before, he will continue to do; what he has done in one part of his domain, he will do in another. Faith is required to do this thinking because otherwise the brute events of life will cause us to draw the wrong conclusions. They are in effect a test of our faith, and the way God wishes us to deal with them is to argue against the apparent mindlessness of the material world and to see the caring hand of God behind it. His hand operates even though the earth is under a curse, for he sent it and it touches precisely who he intends it to touch. The Almighty is able to keep his people even under troubles and in the midst of darkness.
What hope does the materialist have of seeing life in this way, when for him there is only a blind, mechanical world, incapable of compassion or kindness, but immensely cruel? Those who are addressed here can call God their Father in heaven. The extraordinary thing is that that they have trusted God for salvation, but they are unable to trust him to provide for them in their daily lives, to do practical things for them. That is a great inconsistency in their faith. They might even be tempted to wonder how they have any faith at all, if they cannot trust him for concrete provisions, for food and clothing. But no, the Lord says, they have trusted him for forgiveness and salvation and they have genuinely been converted. They are going to heaven and nothing can separate them from the love of God, and yet, though they have such a great inheritance waiting for them, they find it hard to trust him for far lesser things. No wonder he calls them those of little faith. The implication is that we do not realise properly how much has been done for us, how much we are loved by God. Is the reason we face trials, because he does not care about us? No, it is because he is training our faith and giving us an opportunity to exercise faith which would be denied us if we could see his hand bringing food to our mouths and making clothes to put on our backs. Somehow we find it easier to trust God for salvation than we do for providence. This is strange given that it is a far greater work for him to deliver us from sin by giving his Son for us, than it is to arrange the events that take place in this world in favour of his children.
It is false humility for Christians to deliberately cultivate such a low view of themselves that they see themselves as unimportant in the sight of their heavenly Father. Though we are indeed nothing in essence, the truth is that God has made us the apple of his eye and we must learn to evaluate ourselves as he sees us. We are much more precious than any of the birds of the air or the beasts of the field and certainly more than the flowers whose glory lasts but a moment.
Does this mean that nothing bad will ever happen to us, that we will be protected from all set-backs and carried on a litter through the whole of life? No, we must learn to trust God even though we face hardships, apparent evils and set-backs. Faith is not something that can be left upstairs in the loft and never got down or looked at. Faith must be used every day; it is an immensely practical gift. It is our shield with which we must extinguish the flaming arrows of the evil one and we cannot lay it down and imagine we can live life successfully without it.
‘Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.’ It is remarkable that Christ needs to state something as obvious as this, but this shows how small our faith is. We are like children in the kingdom of heaven, needing to have the most basic things explained to us. How could we think for a moment that God our Father did not know about all the details of our lives, and yet we forget this and worse, we doubt this? What a small view of God we have – a God who needs to learn from us, a God who forgets. But the God of the Bible is infinite in knowledge; he knows all things from beginning to end.
Let us value our salvation more and more; let us think of Christ and wonder at him and be grateful to him; let us value our spiritual blessings and be deeply concerned and involved in the mission and the kingdom of God; and let us think of heaven and treasure these treasures and work for that great and coming day. Then the world will relax and lose its hold upon us.