Modern man is prey to a number of dread destroyers, ancient evils which have grown to mammoth proportions in our time and destroy man, not by snapping short his life in one fearful attack, but rather, by their daily dogging of his steps, strip all the beauty, satisfaction and usefulness from his life as he lives it. As Stephen Vincent Benet says:

Life is not lost by dying:

Life is lost, minute by minute,

Day by dragging day,

In all our thousand small, uncaring ways.

Who are the dread destroyers? We know them well and their power to destroy. Their names are Worry, Fear, Anxiety, about sickness, about old age, about death, about tomorrow. Because of their serious threat to our daily well-being I have decided to devote four Thursday evenings to a study of how these destroyers operate and what Jesus tells us about the amazing spiritual resources available for us to defeat them.

Tonight, let us take the first of them — worry. And the first thing I want to say about worry is that I promise I’ll not just tell you in a number of pious and polite preachments: “Don’t worry. Don’t worry.” Certainly nothing could be more exasperating to a man with a heavy burden of worry than to hear someone with not a care in the world, or at least not loaded down with his particular worry, cheerily chirp: “Aw, buck up. Quit your worrying.” I promise not to do that.

And the second thing I want to say is that it is rather important for us to distinguish at the outset between worry and concern. Some time ago I heard about a member of our Idlewild congregation who was on a committee backing some worthwhile community project. The committee was dissatisfied with the newspaper publicity they were getting. Our Idlewild man was delegated to discuss the lagging publicity with one of our editors. “We are greatly disappointed over the support your paper has been giving our campaign,” said the businessman. “The other members are worried over the successful outcome of our venture and I’m concerned.” “Now, wait a minute,” said the editor. “You say your fellow committee members are worried and you are concerned. I don’t quite get the distinction.” “Oh,” said the man, “I never worry, but I do get concerned.

Yes, there is a distinction between worry and concern. Leslie Weatherhead, in his book, Prescription for Anxiety, points out that if his wife is out late, far beyond the expected hour of her return, of course he is troubled. If he were not, it would prove that he did not care. Concern, he maintains, is that which prompts him to do something about it — to call the place where the meeting has been held which she was attending, to call the friends with whom she went, or the garage where she usually parks her car. “Worry” writes Weatherhead, “I would reserve for that fruitless activity of the mind which keeps thoughts revolving endlessly without issue in action. It is like racing an automobile engine without letting in the clutch. One wastes gasoline and energy, but one does not move. Worry exhausts one and yet does not move through one’s problem.” (Leslie Weatherhead — Prescription for Anxiety, p. 85, Abingdon, 1956) We need to make this necessary distinction between worry and concern.

The third thing I want to do is to both underscore the importance of genuine religious faith in the defeat of worry and to affirm that faith without certain definite, practical works of faith, is a dead dodo of a soldier in the battle against worry.

Now first a word about the genuine, indispensable, specific therapeutic value of faith. In his great sermon on the mount, Jesus gives a prominent place to some important teaching about worry. As Mr. Phillips translates from the Greek, Jesus says over and over, “Don’t worry, don’t worry.” This is so much better translation than the King James Version which comes up with the rather meaningless phrase — “take no thought for the morrow,” and even better than the R. S. V. — “Be not anxious for the morrow”.

“Don’t worry,” says Jesus, about what you are going to eat or wear. Don’t worry over your limitations — your worry can’t make you an inch taller. Don’t worry about tomorrow. And then He points clearly to the one spiritual specific for worry, faith. Just trust in God for tomorrow’s food and clothing. He takes care of the birds of the air and the flowers in the garden. You, His children, are of much greater value to Him. So stop your worrying. Just rely upon Him.

Faith makes a whale of a difference, whether we have it or not, in the battle with worry. Without it we are lost.

Yes, faith is indispensable in our battle with worry. Win faith and the victory is ours. But how to keep faith ever strong? Ah, there’s the rub. Just to say once in a solemn ceremony, “I believe. Enroll me as a believer”, is not enough. The fires of faith sometimes burn very low. There are many adverse winds. Some practical expressions of our faith in God we must exhibit, turning faith into action, or we shall not be able to shake our worries, get relief, and win the victory. We must put some feet to our faith.

First, when worry comes, we must do something about it. When we catch ourselves engaging in what Weatherhead calls worry, “that fruitless activity of the mind which keeps thoughts revolving endlessly without issue in action,” we must ask, “What can I do about this?” and then do it. If you find yourself lying awake at night worrying about what you will say in a difficult letter that waits your writing, it is better to switch on the light, jot down some outline of the letter, than just to lie awake worrying about it. If at the moment it is impossible to do anything about it, you can decide what you will do, for deciding is a sort of doing.

A second practical step when worries come: do something else. Perhaps, for example, you have been worrying about your job, even as you work the chance is that there is not something else about your worry that you need to do — you have been worrying because you are too close to it. Therefore you need badly to do something else for a while. You are suffering from what Winston Churchill has called a “spasm of the muscles of the mind.” Your thoughts have ensnared a worry and will not let it go. Arguing with yourself, saying: “Stop worrying about this silly thing,” will do no good. In such a circumstance, reason is not much help. Your worry has caught your mind in a vise-like grip of emotions, and emotions don’t listen very carefully to reason. What is to be done?

Stop the argument within, and gently insinuate something else into the mind’s grasp. A crying child in tears over her broken doll cannot be consoled until she is diverted. Just produce an ice cream cone and gently slip it into the chubby hand. Take away the doll and the charm is worked. Mr. Churchill said that when the worries of state harassed him and the muscles of the mind were in spasm, holding fiercely to some worry, he often picked up his paints and forgot it all. Likewise, some wise women, when worries become unbearable, go out and buy a red hat. For you, it may be a hand of bridge, a walk in the country, a game of golf that will turn the trick. Whatever you like very much, whatever is for you completely absorbing, which takes you away, that do.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes about the necessity of preserving a satisfying rhythm to life, an ebb and flow of withdrawal and emergence, of attack on the harsh realities of life with all their problems and a retreat to activities which recreate the spiritual powers and capacities.

I would like here to put in my nickle’s worth of resentment about the peckerwoods who persist in taking pot shots at our great President Eisenhower for his golf playing and fishing trips for relaxation. Whoever carries responsibility needs to preserve this rhythm of life, and the more the responsibilities and the heavier, the more urgent is the need for recreation which will take one away, break the connection momentarily, so that man’s natural tendency to grasp a problem or a responsibility in a vice-like emotional spasm of worry will be destroyed.

Here is seen the value of our church’s recreation program — and why it forms a part of the total ministry to man’s needs which the church of Jesus Christ must always assume. When worry strikes, first do something about it. Second, do something else.

Third, do something to restore or strengthen your spiritual life. What we often fail to realize is that our spiritual resources need constant replenishing. We have to come daily to God for our spiritual strength and food for that day. Prayer, worship, Bible study, daily supply sustenance for that day, bring us back to the proper perspectives in which we should view duty and relationships and values. Without the practical disciplines of the spiritual life we cannot avail ourselves of these real resources and win the victory over worry.

Nothing is more important to us at this juncture than to realize and accept that we must live just one day at a time. A woman carrying a distressingly heavy load of care, watching a beloved sister endure pain in an apparently incurable illness, yet bearing up with cheerful courage, said: “The only way I can make it is just to live one day at a time.”

Sir William Osler used to urge his students, whom he knew would soon emerge to carry the heavy responsibilities of physicians and surgeons, to live “in day-tight compartments,” and Robert Louis Stevenson, who had so many dark days, said that “every man can get through till nightfall.” And that wonderful organization which has done so much for men and women worried with alcoholism, lays down as a basic, invariable discipline to strive to keep sober just one day at a time.

The Lord Jesus Christ who knows our human nature so well, its glories and its limitations, urges the same vigorous discipline upon us in our fight with our worries: “Don’t worry today over tomorrow. Tomorrow can take care of itself.” For man’s glory and his tragedy is that he is made in God’s image. He has an immortal soul. God has set eternity in his heart. He is both a creature caught in time, and transcending time. He therefore is not like the beast of the field. He is equipped with memory and can look back to the past and, seeing failures and sins, be plagued with worries of remorse. He also has imagination and expectancy and can project his thought into the future and so worry about how he will make out if thus and so takes place. Man’s salvation is in his religious faith, accepting his deliverance from remorse over past sins through forgiveness, and deliverance over anxieties about his future through trust in his God’s goodness and power to provide, living one day at a time.

Mr. C. S. Lewis, in writing of his uncle Hamilton’s Canadian wife, said of her that she had “the unobtrusive talent for making all things at all times as cheerful and comfortable as circumstances allowed. What one could not have one did without and made the most of it. The tendency of the Lewises (the other side of his family) to reopen wounds and to rouse sleeping dogs was unknown to her.” (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Harcourt, Brace Co., p. 42, 1956)

And those of us who, in simple Christian faith, make use of the practical means of grace for living one day at a time will inevitably develop healthy mental and spiritual habits to defeat worry.