You can throw the whole weight of your anxieties upon him, for you are his personal concern. (PHILLIPS)
Maybe you have had the experience of carrying a heavy load which was close to unbearable. Then someone came alongside and offered to take the load off you, and you willingly and gladly gave it over to them.
This is the picture envisaged in our text today. Anxieties weigh us down. Certain things in our life and in the lives of others seem beyond help or hope. The burden is crushing, not allowing us to live freely and to be the people we are meant to be.
We are invited to fling those cares onto the shoulders of the God who cares for us. He alone can bear the weight of them. He alone knows the way forward. He alone can help us. We are urged not to be half-hearted about all this. When we pray to God about our worries, we are not to see it as a mere form of words which leaves the worries squarely on our shoulders. We give them to him not just in words but in an act of will.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have some responsibility for dealing with those worries. Flinging them on to God is not a way of forgetting all about them, but rather an expression of our need of his sustaining wisdom and help. We hand those cares over to him and invite him to give us only what is our proper responsibility, and to ask him to help us perform it.
A good prayer to pray may go like this: “Father, I give you this problem which I cannot handle on my own. Give me the wisdom to know what I cannot and need not do, and the courage to do what I need to do, and the faith to trust that you have all this in your hands.”
Blessings
David
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