“Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need & thank Him for all He has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts & minds as you live in Christ Jesus. And now, dear brothers & sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true & honorable & right & pure & lovely & admirable. Think about things that are excellent & worthy of praise. Keep putting into practice all you learned & received from me - everything you heard from me & saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.”- Philippians 4:6-9 (NLT)
Paul’s final appeal ends with a reminder to the church of the importance of surrendering our worries and anxieties to God. Let’s remember that Paul is writing this letter from prison. I’m not sure about you, but if I were sitting in a prison cell; I would likely be struggling with some level of anxiety. Stop to consider Paul’s history and how he, before his conversion to Christ, had persecuted the church. The same things he did to punish believers are now his reality. However, Paul has a new and living faith that helps him to find contentment in all circumstances, including imprisonment.
Paul points to prayer as the key component to experiencing God’s peace in all our circumstances. When we pray we focus our hearts and minds on God’s truth and invite the will of God into our situations. Worry is very similar to prayer. Worrying is focusing our hearts and minds on all the bad things we imagine could happen, thus inviting fear into our situation. Both worry and prayer require our participation. They both require our time, energy and focus. That means that we choose whether we will pray or worry when faced with a challenging circumstance.
We can choose to fix our thoughts on what is noble, right, honorable, lovely and true or we can choose to entertain every anxious thought that occupies our minds.
The Apostle Paul in a separate letter to the church at Corinth wrote:
“We can demolish every deceptive fantasy that opposes God and break through every arrogant attitude that is raised up in defiance of the true knowledge of God. We capture, like prisoners of war, every thought and insist that it bow in obedience to the Anointed One.”-2 Corinthians 10:5
Each time we choose prayer we are taking captive those deceptive thoughts and arrogant attitudes that stand in opposition to the knowledge of God. However, in a very real sense, when we worry we are taking our prayer life captive. The time and energy we could expend inviting God into our situation, we waste on rehearsing every negative scenario that our mind can create. Paul understood that prayer ushers God’s peace into your difficult situations, where worry invites anxiety.
What is concerning you today? What difficulties are you facing? You have a choice today. You can pray and invite God into your situation or you can worry and invite anxiety. The choice is yours.
Scott Burr
Dayspring Community Church
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