“Therefore I tell you: Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing?” (Matthew 6:25)
This Sunday we will begin a series of sermons on the true pandemic we face in our country, the exponential growth of fear and worry in our nation.
Many of us spend too much time thinking about all the things that could go wrong…Planes fall from the sky, stock markets crash, and terrorists terrorize. We whistle as we walk through the graveyard – we act unworried – but the “what ifs” are always there. They keep us up at night. And then…well, then a worldwide pandemic shows up! Then variants. Then surges. Then breakthrough cases. Then boosters. Add to all of this the racial and political divide in our nation as well as the culture war being waged, and it’s clear that we Americans are worrying ourselves sick.
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 20.6% of U.S. adults experienced some form of mental illness in 2019 (51.5 million people). That’s 1 in 5 adults. That’s more struggling Americans than there are Canadian citizens! Suicide is the second leading cause of death among people aged 10-34. And, those are 2019 statistics! Another source says divorce rates are up 34%. Imagine the increase in those numbers we’ll see after a year of lockdowns and panic porn from the media.
When you look on the NAMI website under “Warning Signs and Symptoms” for mental illness, the number one warning sign is worry. Worry is Public Enemy Number One.
Self-help aisles in the bookstores are filled with so-called solutions. But worry, at its core, is a spiritual issue. That’s why the only true solution can be found in God’s Word.
I hope you’ll join us over the next four weeks for this new sermon series, “Worried Sick,” as we search together for God’s solution to worry. Bring a friend who needs to hear it!
Hope to see you Sunday!
