Most people spend a lot of time and energy obsessing over all the “what ifs” in our lives. What if it rains? What if I lose my job? What if I’m late? What if I flunk the test? What if… What if… What if… According to one source the average American is in a bad mood 110 days each year. That means about 30 percent of the time, people are in bad moods because of things like worry and stress and anger and depression.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus had some very direct things to say about worry. He simply said: “Do not worry.” While this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have legitimate concerns in our lives, it does mean that we mustn’t give too much concern for things over which we have no control, or circumstances that might never occur. Instead Jesus taught us to “seek first” the Kingdom of God and then “all these things” will be given us as well.
I like the approach Max Lucado took regarding worry. He presents eight worry stoppers. I like his list a whole lot.

P = Pray First. 1 Peter 5:7 says “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” Instead of pacing the floors of the waiting room; pray for a successful surgery; rather than bemoaning the collapse of the stock market; ask God to help provide for your needs.
E = Easy Now. Many of our biggest fears and worries are the result of running ahead of God. We can refuse to let God be God and work on His own schedule. But Psalm 46:10 begins, “Be still, and know that I am God…”
A = Act on it. James 4:7 says, “Anyone…who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.” Sometimes with all our fretting and worry, we don’t do the good that we KNOW God wants us to do.

C = Compile a Worry List. Take some time to physically write down your anxious thoughts. Then after your worries are recorded take time to review them. How many turned into reality? How many never happened at all?
E = Evaluate your worries. Don’t throw that list away just yet. Look back over it again. It will probably reveal some themes of worry. You will most likely detect areas where you fret more than others. Use your worry list to compile your prayer list. You can pray specifically about the things that trouble you most.

F = Focus on today. The Lord usually doesn’t meet our needs in bulk form. He tends to meets our daily needs on a daily basis. Not weekly or annually. God will give you what you need when it is needed. And often JUST when it is needed.

U = Unleash a worry army. Admit your tendencies to fret with a few fellow believers. Share your new worry generated prayer concern list with them and ask them to pray with you and for you.

L = Let God Be Enough. Listen to how Jesus concluded this section about worry in His great sermon: “…your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.” Are you willing to do that? That’s what it all boils down to: being willing to let God supply what you need.

One of the best things about the Bible is that it is very realistic about both the positives and negatives in the lives of the characters it describes. Moses was used by God to lead His people out of slavery in Egypt, but Moses had his moments of failure. Fortunately God was able to overcome Moses’ fear of failure to use him to lead His people out of Egypt.

Exodus 2:11 reveals a huge moment of failure in Moses’ life: he saw an Egyptian beating one of his Hebrew countrymen and killed the Egyptian, hiding his body in the sand. We don’t know if Moses thought he was going to singlehandedly deliver Israel through his own power or what was in his mind. We do know that God’s plan did not involve murder or deceit. We also know that the next day it became clear that his deed was known and he took off across the desert to make a new life for himself in the land of Midian.

We can learn a lesson from this part of Moses’ story, that everybody fails sometime in their life. James 3:2 is very specific about that. James wrote: “We all stumble in many ways….” Everybody fails in their lives, but failing at something does not make you a failure.

Forty years later Moses had made that new life for himself. He had married and had two sons. He was a shepherd helping to care for his father-in-law’s flocks. One day like any other day as Moses was talking the flocks to pasture he saw a bush that was burning but was never consumed. The Angel of the Lord appeared and told Moses that God wanted him to go and lead Israel out of Egypt. Moses was not excited about the assignment! In fact, he replied with a series of excuses. God replied to each of Moses’ excuses to let him know that He was with Moses and would equip him with what he needed to do the job he was called to do.
The lesson for us is that even if we have failed, we can’t let fear of failure paralyze us and keep us from following where God leads us. Just as God equipped Moses to do what he was calling him to do, so God will equip us and empower us to do what He is leading us to do. Success is not up to us, it is up to God. What is up to us is being willing to get up after failure and going where God leads.

Failure is not final. It was not final for Moses and it does not have to be final for us. The great American inventor Thomas Edison once said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Scripture says it like this in Galatians 6:9: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at a proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Isn’t it true that many of us give up too quickly? I wonder how many people let the fear of failure keep them from getting back up and causing them to give up too quickly.

Don’t let the fear of failure keep you from doing what God is calling you to do.

We live in a fear-filled culture. We’re afraid of terrorists; swine flu; running out of money; cancer; losing our job and much, much more. Fear is like a bully lurking in our lives.
In Matthew 8, Jesus and the Twelve got into a boat to cross to the other side of Galilee when, in Matthew’s words: “without warning, a furious storm came up on the lake, so that the waves swept over the boat.” Does that remind you of anything in your life? Aren’t there times when “storms” come into our lives and we feel like that next wave will take us under? The next wave of bills; the next wave of discouragement; the next wave of rejection. The Disciples thought they were going under. They looked around: “Where’s Jesus?” He is asleep in the stern. That’s the first lesson storms can teach us: storms force us to look for Jesus.

The Disciples woke Jesus up and actually gave Him orders. They said, “Lord, save us! We’re going to drown!” They were giving Jesus orders. We do that too, don’t we? When we are facing a storm, we think we know just what God needs to do to fix it for us. Mark’s parallel account is interesting. The Twelve wake Jesus up and ask Him: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” Sometimes our fear can cause us to assume that God doesn’t care enough to do something about our struggles.
Fear can do more than that. It can corrode our confidence in God’s goodness. We think, “How can God really care about me when He’s sleeping while a storm is going on in my life?”

Fear can also turn us into control freaks. Remember the Disciples ordering Jesus around? When we feel like things are spinning out of our control, we will grab for whatever we can. The more insecure we feel the ruder and meaner and angrier we can get.

Fear can erase our memory. This storm came at the end of a memorable day when Jesus healed and taught and displayed His power. But now they can’t seem to remember Who was in their boat.

Most important, fear empties our life of joy. When we are afraid, God can become an afterthought in our life. You can’t be contented, generous, or obedient when you are afraid.

About the only thing these guys did right was to wake Jesus up. When fear rules our lives, safety becomes our god. When safety becomes our god, we worship the risk-free life. But risk-free never accomplishes much. In athletics, medicine, and life itself greatness always comes through taking a risk. The worship of safety has no room for greatness. No wonder the Lord wages such a war against fear.

Will you join us in memorizing this verse this week? Paul wrote, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.”

In Isaiah 58:1-12 God sent a message telling Israel that their commitment to Him needed to be more than rituals and routines. He wanted more of them. And he wants more from us. These verses specifically deal with fasting and how Israel was observing the fast, but you can look at it from the broader perspective of any religious discipline or practice. Like Israel, we sometimes use “spiritual things” as excuses to live how we want, and refuse to live out our duty to love others.

Scholars picture Isaiah’s message taking place at a large religious festival, like the Day of Atonement. The people were participating in the rituals God had prescribed: worshipping, giving, and praying. But God was not pleased with their worship. God told them that they were in rebellion against Him.

Israel’s reaction to the message probably would have been something like this: “What are you talking about Isaiah? We’re fasting and making sacrifices and worshipping God. We are doing what He told us to do. And now you tell us we are in rebellion?”

But that was exactly God’s point. He was telling them that He was rejecting their worship because their attitude revealed that they did not have the proper motivation or the proper attitude for their actions. They were using worship, fasting, and prayer to manipulate God into doing what they wanted.

In our lives, this is the attitude that says as long as I am in church on Sunday, I can do whatever I choose on Monday. God told Israel that what they were doing every day: manipulating others; fighting; treating others unfairly; and taking advantage of the less fortunate cancelled out any good they were doing in their worship. They had a sense of entitlement. Their attitude was “God owes us.”

Unfortunately, sometimes our attitude mirrors that of Israel in Isaiah’s day. We can have a similar sense of entitlement. We pray about something and then we expect God to do exactly as we want Him to. We think God OWES us something because we worship Him. Sometimes it’s even worse than that. We turn our worship, prayer, or Bible reading and into something to get God off our backs, or get Him to do what we want. When we do that we make a mistake, just like Israel did. When we act that way the Lord can’t break through to us with His righteousness and neither can He work through us to touch others with His mercy.

Our meal with Jesus this week is a traditional holiday meal. Passover meant the same thing year after year. The same foods, the same readings, and the same questions and answers.

Passover looked back to God delivering His people from slavery in Egypt and the plague of death on the firstborn in that land. Each year, they ate the same meal of strange recipes and flavors—salt water to remind them of the tears of slavery; bitter herbs, so they would remember the sour taste of bondage; fruit mixed with cinnamon sticks to remind them of how they were forced to make bricks of clay and straw; bread made without yeast, to remind them to be holy and ready to travel as the people were in Moses’ day. Part of the tradition was four cups of wine drunk throughout the night drawn from four promises made by God to Israel in Exodus 6: “I will bring you out … I will free you from being slaves … I will redeem you … I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God.”

But this night some of the things that happened were not the usual routines. Before the meal even began Jesus got a basin of water and wrapped Himself in a towel and started to wash His disciples’ feet! When He got to Simon Peter, he tried to stop Him but Jesus said if He didn’t wash their feet they had no place with Him. So Simon overreacted (like usual) and said “Then wash me all over.” Jesus told him that wasn’t the point because if you are clean you don’t have to wash all over except your feet.

Later it seemed that things had returned to normal, but it didn’t stay that way. Jesus picked up the bread, and said a prayer to bless it. Then He broke it and gave it to His Disciples. That was normal, but then He broke away from tradition and said, “Take and eat; this is my body given for you; do this to remember me.” Then after supper, he took a cup of wine, but instead of the traditional blessing, Jesus said that the cup was the new covenant in His blood. This wasn’t part of the Passover ritual! This was different. The disciples didn’t realize it then, but the Lord was not following the traditions of the past, He was establishing something new; a memorial meal. He wanted to use the simple elements of bread and wine to symbolize that His soon to be broken body and His blood that soon flow. It truly was the New Covenant in His blood because Jesus went through what He did for us.

We all needed His atoning sacrifice. This Holy Week, let’s all remember the sacrifice He made for us. And thank God for His indescribable gift!