Our God will carry us, nurse us, and bind up our wounds, even as we feel the loss, and he will get us to where he has promised. Now is not the whole story. But he is with us now, taking care of what he knows we need. This is the kind of gospel that can meet our anxiety when we are widowed, when Parkinson’s comes, in redundancy, divorce, and heart attacks. Do not, Christian, do not be anxious. Not because there is nothing to fear, but because we have a Father, and day by day he will provide.

It is hard to talk about anxiety in a helpful way. At best, I have a shallow, half-understanding of anxiety. I am not a psychologist, and I no longer have the absolute confidence of a person who has only known one story of anxiety up close. A flat, simple story of anxiety is easy to talk about. Sad thing is, the story of anxiety gets more complex with every real person you engage with.

Discussion around anxiety is everywhere. In his recent book, The Anxious Generation, New York University professor Jonathan Haidt offers an interpretation of the overwhelming reports of massive anxiety among teenagers and young people by focusing on the destructive impact of smartphones and social media on childhood.

Lauren Oyler, a young novelist, offers a perspective from within the anxious generation. She wrote an essay in the New Yorker in March 2024 about her own experience of anxiety and uncertainty about the kind of help she might or might not need. It’s a good read if you want to hear someone’s experience of trying to talk about her own anxiety in the context of a cultural deluge. And she points out that we are not the first people to experience a huge uptick in reports of anxiety as we see the world changing around us:

The concept of Americanitis, popularized by William James at the end of the nineteenth century, described “the high-strung, nervous, active temperament of the American people,” according to an 1898 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The causes — advances in technology and accompanying pressures of capitalism — were much the same as they are today.[1]

Please do not think I am minimizing anxiety. I am grateful that it is way less stigmatized than even a decade ago and that good therapy and effective medications are far more widely available. Good people are doing good work to help people in real suffering.

But, or even better said, and whenever we’re faced with something that seems out of control in our current moment, we do well to look beyond our moment.

Jesus knows the anxiety of change. He taught people whose political worlds were defined by hostile occupation, economic volatility, and colonial pragmatism. Their daily lives were lives without refrigeration, without preservatives, without Ziploc^© bags. Each day, the question of where food was coming from was as live a question as whether the authorities would crack down on them. In the face of all these unknowns, how could they be anything but anxious?

Matthew 6:24-34 does not provide us with a silver bullet to the whole problem of anxiety. Jesus is not offering a simplistic “stop it!” to people whose brains and bodies play host to generalized anxiety or traumatic responses.

Instead, this passage must be read in context, and when we do, we will see that Jesus is focused on a key tension:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.  (Matt. 6:24-34, ESV)

Step back with me. The thesis that sets up this key tension is this: faced with anxiety about the future, we will be devoted to the one thing that truly gives us hope, and we will consider other sources of hope inconsequential. Jesus goes so far as to say that we will even come to despise them.

And here is the tension: What will that source of hope be? Ultimately, Jesus teaches, in the face of uncertainty, we will either devote ourselves to our own capacity to meet trouble, here represented by money, or we will devote ourselves to the conviction that God cares for us. We will either devote ourselves to our own capacity to meet trouble, primarily through money, but possibly also hustle, worry, politics, and more — power in our own hands — or we will devote ourselves to the conviction that God, our Father, cares for us. Power cradling us in his own hands.

It will almost never feel this black and white, but in those moments of interior crisis we will preach to ourselves one of two gospels: I am alone, or I am a child.

1. I am alone. If I anticipate and mitigate every crisis that tomorrow might bring, I may be able to take care of myself. I may be able to please the gods. I may be able to future-proof myself.
2. I am a child. I have a loving heavenly Father who has saved my life and will add to that all I need for each day.

It feels so binary, yet these are the two options everything else boils down to. Mitigating crises might not look like building our bank balance; it might look like surrounding ourselves with capable people who owe us favors or building our positive karma. These options go beyond action and back to identity. And fundamentally, they go back beyond our own identity to the identity of God himself. Does he exist? Does he care? Can he help?

So those are our two choices: Am I alone, or am I loved? Jesus asks us which narrative we will believe. But they are choices offered with a huge bias: come towards love. Jesus beckons us towards God’s love using three reminders.

First, we are to choose our heavenly Father over money.

We cannot begin to understand this text and this teaching without understanding the context. There are two instances of the word ‘therefore’ in this passage, and the first is almost at the beginning, in verse 25. This first ‘therefore’ is emphatic.  In fact, it is not the usual word for ‘therefore’: it is more like ‘hey!’ Because of all this, therefore…

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