The Sin of Anxiety
Text: Matthew 6:25
Series: Restoration Sermons
Date:
Speaker: Ed Rangel
Location: Waupaca Church of Christ
Bible Version: NASB 1995
Sermon Type: Expository
Learning Objectives
By the close of this lesson the hearer should be able to:
- Explain why anxiety is called a "sin" in this sermon — not merely a feeling — using the logic of Matt. 6:25 and 6:24.
- Identify the two causes of anxiety and explain how each one involves a misplacement of what the person values.
- Define contentment from Phil. 4:11 — what Paul means by "learned" — and explain why contentment is a discipline rather than a temperament.
- State the two-part remedy the outline prescribes and identify the specific text that ties them together.
- Explain why "no room in thankful hearts for worry" is theologically accurate, not merely a piece of practical advice.
Thesis
Anxiety is not merely an emotional condition — it is the practical expression of misplaced trust. The person who worries about what they will eat or wear has, at the level of daily functioning, placed more confidence in their own management of material circumstances than in the God who provides them. The remedy is not a technique for managing anxiety but a reorientation of the whole person toward God — through contentment that has been learned and prayer that has become habitual.
Burden
"Worry, fretting and anxiety mean the same." The burden is to establish that the condition the culture treats as an inevitable feature of modern life is, when examined from the perspective of Matthew 6, a theological problem rather than a psychological one. The person who has given their life to God and continues to be dominated by anxiety about material circumstances has not yet finished giving. The sermon presses the question: what are you actually trusting?
Introduction
"For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?" (Matt. 6:25). The command is direct: do not be worried. The reasoning is also direct: life is more than what anxiety focuses on. The person who is consumed by anxiety about food, drink, and clothing has narrowed their vision to the smallest category of life's actual content.
The verse arrives in a specific context. The immediately preceding verse (Matt. 6:24) establishes the theological ground: "No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth." The verse about anxiety is not a detached counsel about emotional management — it flows from the verse about divided loyalty. The person who is anxious about material things has, in that anxiety, demonstrated where their ultimate trust is located. The anxiety is the symptom; the divided loyalty is the disease.
Anxiety of people destroys energy — physical and spiritual. The person consumed by worry has less capacity for work, for relationship, for worship, for the life they are worrying about being unable to live. Anxiety does not protect the future; it consumes the present.
Is there a cure for it? The sermon answers: yes. But the cure is not the elimination of circumstances that produce anxiety; it is the transformation of the person so that those circumstances no longer produce anxiety. Contentment is not the removal of difficulty; it is the capacity to remain at peace in the presence of difficulty.
I. Causes of Anxiety
The two causes of anxiety are not external — they are internal.
Over-emphasis on things. The person who has placed material goods at the center of their concern has organized their life around a category of things that is inherently insecure. "No one can serve God and wealth" (Matt. 6:24): when wealth is the master, its insecurity becomes the master's primary characteristic, and anxiety is the natural response to serving an insecure master.
"Life is not in the abundance of things" (Luke 12:15). The person who has grasped this truth at the level of daily living has removed the foundation of material anxiety. The things are not the life; losing them is not losing the life. The person who knows this is not carefree — they may still recognize the difficulty of circumstances — but they are not anxious, because they know that what can be lost is not what matters.
Material things placed above spiritual values is the specific inversion that produces anxiety. When physical security is the primary good, physical insecurity is the primary threat. The person whose primary concern is their eternal standing before God can afford to hold material circumstances loosely.
Lack of faith. The second cause is simpler to state and harder to resolve: the person who does not actually trust God will worry about the things God has promised to provide. "All things are possible" (Mark 9:23); "according to your faith be it done to you" (Matt. 9:29); "do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me" (John 14:1). The antidote to the troubled heart is, in every case, the expansion of faith. The person whose faith is small has more room for anxiety; the person whose faith is large has less.
II. Contentment
The alternative to anxiety is not optimism or denial — it is contentment: the cultivated capacity to rest in the present regardless of circumstances.
A great lesson to learn. The word "learn" is significant. Contentment is not a natural disposition that some people have and others lack — it is a discipline to be acquired. The fact that it must be learned means it can be learned; the fact that it must be learned means it will not arrive without effort.
God wants us to learn it. The instruction of Matthew 6:25-34 is not incidental to the Sermon on the Mount; it is central to it. The kingdom values that Christ is teaching throughout the sermon require exactly the reorientation that contentment produces: from material security to divine provision, from anxious management of circumstances to trusting stewardship of what has been given.
Paul learned it. "Not that I speak from want, for I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content" (Phil. 4:11). The verb is manthanō — the ordinary word for learning through study and experience. Paul's contentment was not a gift of temperament; it was an achievement of formation. He had been through circumstances that required contentment — poverty and abundance, liberty and imprisonment — and in all of them he had found the same ground of rest.
Food and clothing are the only necessities (I Tim. 6:8). The verse establishes the floor: the minimum that constitutes what is actually required. "If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content." The gap between this floor and the standard of living that most people in developed societies treat as a minimum is vast — and in that gap lives a great deal of anxiety that the gospel does not require.
Content with wages (Luke 3:14). The soldiers' instruction from John the Baptist: stop extorting money; be content with your wages. The principle: the person who works for what they receive and is satisfied with what they have earned has found the practice of contentment in the economic sphere.
Content with what we have (Heb. 13:5). "Make sure that your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have; for He Himself has said, 'I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you.'" The verse ties the contentment instruction to the divine promise. Contentment is not merely the discipline of wanting less; it is the trust that the one who has promised never to desert you is reliable.
III. The Remedy
If the causes of anxiety are theological — misplaced trust and lack of faith — the remedy must also be theological.
Prayer. "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God" (Phil. 4:6). The instruction is comprehensive: everything by prayer. The person who brings everything to God in prayer has, in the act of bringing it, transferred the weight of it from their own management to God's. "Take it to the Lord in prayer" — the old hymn captures the movement exactly: not "think about it differently" but "take it somewhere." The prayer is the transfer.
Thanksgiving. Phil. 4:6 ties thanksgiving directly to the prayer and supplication: the requests are to be accompanied by thanksgiving. The conjunction is not accidental. The person who brings a request to God without thanksgiving is bringing anxiety to the throne; the person who brings a request to God with thanksgiving is affirming, in the act of asking, that they trust the one they are asking.
Thanksgiving is a cure for care. The person who is genuinely grateful for what they have cannot be simultaneously anxious about what they might lose, because the gratitude is oriented toward the present (what is here) while the anxiety is oriented toward the future (what might not be here). The two orientations cannot fully coexist in the same mind at the same moment.
Singing banishes worries. The insight belongs to Christian practice — the congregation that sings its thanksgiving genuinely is the congregation that finds the worry unable to hold the room. There is no room in thankful hearts for worry — not as a sentimental observation but as a theological fact: the heart that is fully occupied with the recognition of God's goodness has no vacancy for the anxiety that claims God's goodness is not enough.
Application
Name the anxiety. The person who says "I am not anxious" but who lies awake calculating how circumstances will develop, who runs the scenarios, who finds their mind returning again and again to the same unresolved uncertainty — is anxious. The first step toward the remedy is the honest identification of the condition.
Identify the specific misplacement. Over-emphasis on things, or lack of faith? The person who is anxious about money, security, and material outcomes has identified the cause: the things are too high in the ordering of their values. The person who is anxious despite genuine poverty of spirit — who has few material attachments but still worries — may be dealing with the second cause: faith that is real but small.
Apply the remedy specifically. The problem with generic applications of Philippians 4:6 is that they remain general when the anxiety is particular. The instruction is to bring the specific thing — by name, with the specific request — to God in prayer, with thanksgiving. The generalized sense of anxiety needs to be broken into its specific components, and each one brought individually.
Conclusion
"Do not be worried about your life" (Matt. 6:25). The command is not addressed to people who have no problems — it is addressed to people who do. The birds of the air have no barns; the lilies of the field are not laboring. The person who knows the God who feeds the birds and clothes the lilies and who is still consumed by anxiety about their own provision has allowed the smaller reality to crowd out the larger one.
The cure is not the elimination of problems; it is the expansion of trust. Paul's contentment was not the product of circumstances — it was the product of formation in the knowledge of the God who provides. "I can do all things through Him who strengthens me" (Phil. 4:13). The anxiety ends when the trust begins to match the promise.
Invitation
The God who says "do not be worried" is the God who promises to provide. But the provision he promises is not merely material — it is the provision of himself: "I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you" (Heb. 13:5). The person who has not yet received that promise has the primary anxiety unsettled — the question of where they stand before God. That is the anxiety the gospel addresses first.
Believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Repent. Confess his name. Be baptized for the remission of your sins (Acts 2:38). Settle the primary question. The rest — the material anxieties — will find their proper proportion once the fundamental one has been resolved.
Word Study
| English Term | Greek Term | Basic Meaning | Usage in This Sermon | Sermon Significance | Key Texts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anxious / Worried | merimnaō | To be divided in mind — from merizō (to divide) + nous (mind). To have the mind pulled in multiple directions. | Used in Matt. 6:25 for what Christ commands against: "do not be anxious." | The etymology reveals why anxiety is a theological problem, not merely a psychological one. The divided mind is the mind that has not settled the question of whose it is. The person entirely given to God has an undivided mind; the person with a divided loyalty has an anxious mind. | Matt. 6:25; Phil. 4:6 |
| Content / Contentment | autarkēs / autarkeia | Self-sufficient — autos (self) + arkeo (to be sufficient). The state of being sufficient in oneself, not dependent on external circumstances. | Used in Phil. 4:11 for what Paul has learned: "I have learned to be content (autarkēs)." | The word is Stoic in origin — the Stoic autarkeia was independence from all external goods. Paul takes the concept and redirects it: the contentment is not from the self's independence from God but from the self's settled trust in God's provision. The Christian's self-sufficiency is actually God-sufficiency. | Phil. 4:11; I Tim. 6:6 |
| Supplication | deēsis | An urgent, specific request — from deomai, to be in need, to want. Distinct from general prayer in its specificity. | Used in Phil. 4:6: "by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." | The word specifies what is required: not general expressions of trust but specific, named requests. The anxiety that is addressed by prayer is the anxiety about specific things; it is addressed by the specific bringing of those things to God. | Phil. 4:6 |
| Thanksgiving | eucharistia | Good grace — eu (good/well) + charis (grace, gift). The acknowledgment that what one has received is a gift of grace. | Used in Phil. 4:6 as the accompaniment to supplication: requests made known "with thanksgiving." | The conjunction is theological: thanksgiving is the orientation of the person who already knows God to be a giver. The person who makes requests without thanksgiving is treating God as uncertain; the person who makes requests with thanksgiving has already affirmed that God gives. The affirmation changes the character of the asking. | Phil. 4:6; Col. 3:15 |
Scripture Interlock Table
| Theme | Boles' Outline | Supporting Scripture |
|---|---|---|
| "Do not be worried about your life" — governing command | Text | Matt. 6:25 |
| "You cannot serve God and wealth" — divided loyalty as root of anxiety | I.1 | Matt. 6:24 |
| "Life not in abundance of things" | I.1c | Luke 12:15 |
| "Do not let your heart be troubled" — faith as antidote | I.2c | John 14:1 |
| "I have learned... to be content" | II.3 | Phil. 4:11 |
| "Food and covering — be content" — the floor of necessity | II.4 | I Tim. 6:8 |
| "I will never desert you" — contentment's theological ground | II.6 | Heb. 13:5 |
| "Be anxious for nothing... by prayer and supplication" | III.1 | Phil. 4:6 |
| Baptism for remission — settling the primary anxiety | Invit. | Acts 2:38 |
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Converted from H. Leo Boles, Outline 150. Primary text: Matt. 6:25 (stated by Boles). OCR corrections: "Mott." → "Matt."; "JNTRODUCT!ON" → "INTRODUCTION"; "wony" → "worry"; "ls there" → "Is there". Doctrinal audit: anxiety developed as a theological problem (misplaced trust, lack of faith) rather than merely a psychological condition — the connection to Matt. 6:24 (divided loyalty) is the sermon's key structural insight; contentment developed from Phil. 4:11 as a learned discipline, not a personality type; the remedy (prayer + thanksgiving) developed with the emphasis on the specific (deēsis — specific request) and the accompanying theological orientation (eucharistia — acknowledgment of prior grace); invitation retains full obedient response (Acts 2:38).
