By David ReayTuesday 23 Feb 2016LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 0 minutes
Transcript:
Read 1 Peter 5:7
7 Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you. (NLT)
Let’s say someone gives you an old photograph to examine. You will want to look at it closely and so hold it up to your eyes. As you do so, other things get obscured. That one thing is taking up all your attention and vision. Which is not a great problem given that it is only temporary and it is quite right to give such a thing your full attention.
It becomes a bit of a problem when it comes to various life issues that confront us. They might dominate us to such an extent that we scarcely see anything else. An anxiety can overwhelm us so that we lose perspective. It occupies much of our time and energy. Other things fall by the wayside. We don’t function as we need to do.
This text might seem to offer simplistic advice. It looks so easy but, as we who worry know very well, it is hard to put into practice. But just because it is hard doesn’t mean it is wrong, and doesn’t mean it is impossible.
We give our worries to God in the sense of sharing them with him and, as far as we can manage, leaving them with him. Sure, we mention them to God consistently. But we avoid letting them so dominate our prayers that we scarcely pray about anything else. We recognise our anxiety-causing issue, but we seek not ourselves be single-issue people.
We are not called upon to bury our anxieties, pretending they don’t matter. We release them to our God who cares about us and allow him to show us the way forward. He may change the circumstances, or he may change us, or he may do both. Trustful prayer may not even so take away every speck of worry, but it will grant a truer perspective. And that may be enough.
Blessings
David Reay