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Date: October 18, 2026
Sermon Title: Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Passage: Luke 12:22–34
Preacher: Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest - Lead Pastor
Transcript Summary: Jesus teaches that worry and anxiety can keep us from experiencing the abundant life God offers. We are called to surrender the illusion of control, trust in our Heavenly Father’s care, and seek His kingdom above all else.
Transcript
We have been on a journey together for quite some time, on a very long journey, sometimes on the narrow road, sometimes on the wide road. The goal, of course, is to be on the narrow one, but many of us find our way over to that wide road from time to time. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's the way Jesus teaches us to live a life. And there are ways to live a life that lead to abundance and to happiness and to joy in this life and into the next. And then there are ways to live a life that leads to death and to destruction in this life and the next.
This morning we're talking about worry and anxiety. And nobody needs to tell you, not even Jesus, that a life of worry and anxiety is a road to death and destruction. It steals the joy from you. And as much as don't worry, be happy is a cavalier way of saying, just deal with your life's problems, I don't think this is what Jesus is calling us to exactly.
But he is encouraging us not to be anxious and not to worry. And he's reminding us that there is a better way, and it is a narrow way, and it's actually a hard way, some of us more than others. But this morning I want to talk about how to do that and what it looks like. And so I hope you will pay attention to see the ways in which Jesus is calling us into the fullness of life.
As I was getting ready for this morning, there is a man that I came across. I didn't know him, and I'm going to guess you don't either. His name is Paul Kingsnorth. He was a longtime environmentalist and a self-described pagan.
But that was many years ago. He has since become an Orthodox Christian. And in 2021, he wrote a beautiful essay for a magazine called First Things. And it's called The Cross and the Machine, in which he tells of his own conversion.
And in the essay, he has this quote that's on the screen up here. He says, as we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over humility, over choosing separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day. The choices between surrender and rebellion, the choices between sacrifice and conquest, each of these by the way could be its own Broad way, narrow way, sermon, surrender, rebellion, sacrifice, conquest, death of the self, or triumph of the will. And the options he gives us are between the cross and what he calls the machine.
We have always been offered the same choice, he says. The gate is straight and the way is narrow, and maybe we will always fail to walk it. But is there any other road that leads home? The answer, of course, is no, there is not.
And what he calls the machine here is another way of talking about the broad way, the fallenness of the world, the fallenness of you and of me. The machine is another name for what we call the flesh, what we call our ego. It's societal sin. It's our sin nature living deep down in.
It's a churning of everything wrong with the world as it is. And as he says, and as Jesus will tell us, the only other option is the cross. That we must die to ourself and we must live to Christ because that is the only way home. For most of this year, we've been talking about transformation, and we've been talking about the narrow road that leads to abundant life, the wide road that leads to death.
And one of the deep ironies of our Christian faith is that the road that leads to life is a road that has to have a cross on it. Meanwhile, the road that leads to death is the road that is you avoiding everything that might get you to the cross. It is only in relinquishing your life that you find it, but by trying to salvage it, you lose it. I believe it was Jesus who said this first.
Let us pray together. Heavenly Father, as we come to study your word, As we open our hearts and our minds to what you have to teach us today, Lord, we bring to you our worry. We each have it. Every last one of us has something right now that we can name immediately that we are in fact worried about, our anxiety.
And Lord, you teach us to cast our cares upon you. And so we come this morning trying to do just that. Help us have faith. Help us have the kind of faith that brings to you everything.
In Christ's name we pray, amen. If this sermon is one thing, it's a sermon on dependence. It's a sermon on learning how to depend on God for just about anything and everything. But it's also a sermon about the illusions that you and I carry, Namely, the illusion that we're actually in control of our own life.
And I think Jesus is trying to tell you, are not in control of your own life. And this is one of these things that must be pinned to the cross. Because it's also a sermon about the cross. The cross as the only way home.
And so there are things in your life that need to die and that need to go away so that true life and abundance can in fact be born and reborn within you. Which is all to say this is a sermon about faith. It's a sermon about walking the life of faith. It's a sermon about trusting God with every last piece of who you are.
And when we worry or we have anxiety, It means that there are these pieces of us that we are still trying to hold on to or that we think we can if we just grip hard enough. And my hope today is that by the end of this sermon, you have released something, even just a little bit. But as I started or in the prayer, I said, we each carry anxiety in this room with us here and right now. And I believe that.
And I'm going to guess that you each can immediately think of something. So I want you to stop thinking of that thing for a second. And I want you to zip back in time. Go back a few years and try to find something that you were anxious about for a time and that is no longer causing you any anxiety.
Take that trip with me. I'll give you one that I thought of. When Ezra was very little, and in fact, all of our kids were very little, We used to put them in a sleep sack every night. The sleep sack, if you don't have one, is one of these head to toe sacks so that you then zip it up and there's room for the arms to do this, but the legs don't come out.
And then you lay your baby into the crib and it kind of keeps them comforted and warm, this kind of thing. And I had this thought that I think Ezra is going to get to college and we'll still be zipping him up at night every night and laying him in the crib and having to tend to every last need of his and the worry that comes with being a parent of a young child. And there's all these concerns, right, that are wrapped up in the sleep sack. And then he actually went to college and as far as I know, he's doing just fine.
doesn't call as much as I'd like him to. No, he's doing quite well. He doesn't need me to tuck him in at night. He's off with friends and taking very much care of himself and whatever anxieties I had 18 years ago are long gone, right?
But they were still real. It's just with a kind of a broader view of your life and of what's coming. some of what you're carrying this morning will inevitably be gone, maybe by tomorrow, maybe by next week, maybe it'll take five years, maybe 25 years. But the anxieties will change, won't they?
And something new will take its place. And so the question that I'm kind of asking you this morning is, what is it and where will it be in five years? And But the real deep question, the one that's like way underneath, is do you trust God enough with that thing right now to say, God has seen me through to this point, and I trust that he's gonna see me through to that next end point as well. There is a poem that I came across again as I was kind of prepping for this.
one's by a famous poet named W. H. Auden. He wrote one called The Age of Anxiety.
It's a good one, worth your time. And he says in it this, he says, the noble despair of the poets, yet the noble despair of a poet is nothing of the sort. It is silly to refuse the tasks of our time. Here he means that you and I each, we come to a certain place in life.
And the task hits us, and we often shrink back from it. And we refuse to engage whatever that thing is in your life right now. Maybe it is a new job that you're supposed to embrace and move into, or maybe it's the retirement that you need to lean into, or maybe it's having a child, or maybe it's the test that's coming up. And rather than leading into this, we often have anxiety, and refuse the task of the moment.
And overlooking our lives, we cry, oh, miserable, wicked me, how interesting I am. And here's what he's doing in this passage. He's saying that you and I, in our anxiety, we often have this tendency not to look out to where God is and what God is doing and to look back at what God has done in my life, but instead to turn inward and to say, oh, miserable me, what's going to happen? My life is so, as he says, as interesting.
But then come the really great lines. because it's in these trials and tests and moments of life where we need to show up most that he says, and I think he's echoing Jesus here, that we would rather be ruined than change. We would rather take the wide road that is easy and to just kind of slouch through life than to embrace the narrow road and to do the hard thing and to actually change. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and to let our illusions die.
One of the greatest illusions in life, as I've said already, is that you are in control of it. All it takes is a midnight phone call from somebody telling you that something is deeply wrong to realize I don't have nearly as much control over this life as I thought I did. And all the clinging and the grabbing at it, well ultimately, what will it come to? Tomorrow, or in a week, or in a year, or in 10 years?
Let's open our scriptures to our passage this morning where Jesus is teaching us what it means to live this kind of life and read from the Gospel of Luke chapter 12 starting in verse 22. Luke 12, 22 goes like this. He said to his disciples, therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing.
Jesus is aiming at some pretty fundamental things here, is he not? You see, you and I don't necessarily worry too much about the things that we eat or wear, except maybe to say that We like fine foods and we like to dress in our Calvin Klein jeans. And we're concerned that other people might look at our attire and think, oh, he's not dressed nice enough or she's slovenly or something. I don't know, something like this.
But what Jesus is talking about is much more basic. It's Maslow's hierarchy is what he's aiming at. Do you have any food at all? Do you have any clothing to put on your body to keep you warm when the temperatures get unseasonably cold very quickly outside?
And he is saying something very difficult, which is what Jesus likes to do. He likes to say hard things. And he says, do not worry about these things. For life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing.
Before we get too far, I should probably say that there are different kinds of anxieties and worries in life, and some are definitely worth your time worrying about. You see, if you walk outside and you're walking in the woods and a big snake with fangs and venom in them comes across your path, you should probably worry about that. And you should step back and you should not keep going. And the worry or fear or anxiety in that moment might just actually save your life if you head in the right direction.
Or maybe there's other worries or fears that come across your plate. And you should probably lean in them and even through them. To give you an example from my own life, when I was living in Alabama, there was a time that came where A friend called me and said, Eric, you need to go talk to the president of the university that you are at because I think he might fire you in the next two days. He thinks you've done something that you have not done, and I know that you've not done this, but he is very concerned.
Naturally, I began to worry. I had severe anxiety over this. The anxiety could have crippled me to the point where I did nothing, but instead I chose to actually do something. And I immediately picked up the phone and I sent off an e-mail and I began to set up a meeting that very day with the president of the university to say to him, listen, I don't know what you've heard and who you've heard it from, but I assure you, I assure you, this was not me and you have nothing to worry about.
I have done nothing here. And so he looks at me and he says, Eric, I am so glad that you walked in today because this week was going to end very differently for you. And he indeed believed me and we moved on and I stayed for a couple more years before I came to this lovely church. And it was one of these moments where you meet the fear of the moment or the anxiety And it's not that you should just not worry.
It's that you should do something with the worry. You should move forward with it. And you should, in fact, try to find ways to resolve the conflict that is sitting there. I wonder, in fact, if this is in part what Auden had in mind by we'd rather be ruined than changed.
Because changing is hard. Doing the right thing can be hard. And sometimes it's just easier to live in our dread and our ruin. Jesus continues in verse 24.
He says this, he says, consider the ravens, they neither sow nor reap. They have neither storehouses nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? And which of you, by being anxious, can add a single hour to his span of life?
If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest? He moves from the animals then to the plants and the lilies. And he says, consider the lilies and how they grow. They don't toil or spin, and yet I tell you, even Solomon in all of his glory was in arrayed like one of those.
But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the fields today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith? And here Jesus gets personal. He really says to his disciples, and he says, the nub of it all, which is, I need more faith from you. I need trust.
I need you to trust me. But more than that, he would say, I need you to trust the Heavenly Father, that he is going to provide for you, and that this too shall pass. And if you understand and you break the illusions that you are in control and you understand who is actually in control and you give your life over to the God of the universe who is in control of all the things, then you can trust that your life too will work out as it is planned to. As I, again, was preparing for this sermon, I came across one of my favorite authors is G.K.
Chesterton, and he has a book on St. Francis of Assisi in which he tells a story about Francis going into a cave, and he comes out of it, this is, of course, almost nonsense, it is nonsensical, which is the purpose, but he comes out walking on his hands And he's walking on his hands, and he's seeing the world upside down. And he sees the world upside down as a place where the buildings are hanging from the skies, and the trees are hanging from the skies. And in our world, the cars and the trucks, and it's all hanging from the God's perspective, which Francis realizes is the right side up.
that it is God who indeed has control over all these things. And if we just simply can trust that in his control he will care for us and he will tend to us, this is what Jesus is saying in these passages. And so he continues, And he says, do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink. Don't be worried about all these things.
For all the nations of the world seek after them, and your Father knows that you need them. And so instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you. Now, this is not to say he will leave you high and dry, and you won't be clothed in life, and you won't get the food you need. It's to say those things are secondary to seeking the ways of the kingdom and that God has control over all those things.
And if we just simply, simply follow the kingdom way, I say simply, the narrow way is rarely simple. But if we can follow that way, well then all of these other things indeed get added. This week I did something interesting that I want to report to you. I kept a very minimal anxiety journal.
I knew I was preaching on this topic and so I thought, well every day I'll just kind of think through like what had me nervous on Monday and what had me nervous on Tuesday and on Wednesday. And now here I am at the end of the week and I'm thinking back on the things that really occupied my mind on these days and not many of them really mattered all that much. And most of them, I will say to you, had to do with yesterday's big trunk or treat, right? As you can imagine, when we have 650 people arriving at our property, that is anxiety producing.
And yet here I am the day after, and that is already in the rear view. And you give it a few more weeks, and we'll all be moving on to something else. But it wasn't just that. I had to come to pull together a Sunday school lesson, and now this sermon that I'm in the middle of, and I'm thinking to myself, well, how?
can it all get done in one week, right? And yet here I am, and after the service is over, I'll go home and take a long nap. I will feel much better after it all. Then I will get up tomorrow morning and We'll do it all over again.
There's another week sitting in front of me. And so I think back to the anxieties of this week. And this is a luxury of being a pastor who gets to talk about these things. I get to ask myself the real question, which is, did I trust God enough in that moment?
I know I'm preaching this sermon. I'm gonna have to talk to the people. I'm gonna have to tell them, like, did I trust God enough in that moment? And my answer is yes and no, right?
Sometimes it gets the best of you. And then other times I set it in this big view and I think, you know what, God is in control and what comes will come. And it's going to be okay. And tomorrow will be a new day and next week will be a new week.
And next year is going to be a new year. To finish up our passage, verse 32 and following goes like this. Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. I love this.
The Father that is given to us on Jesus' own lips is a good Father. who takes pleasure in giving you all the things that you need in this life. Sometimes that includes the challenges that force us to grow. But often it's the good things of life, the things that bring us joy and hope.
It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. So sell your possessions and give them to the needy, provide yourselves with money bags that don't grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. And so the question this morning is ultimately, where is your heart? Where have you placed your trust?
Who are you hoping in? I want to end with a confession. I've given you a few quotes this morning and they all came from the same place. This summer I went to a concert and I saw a band called Mumford and Sons with my friend Ross here and our daughters.
And one of the songs they sing has stuck with me for quite some time, actually. And it's one of these that sounded almost too poetic to not be. And so I looked into it and it turns out it is. And it actually weaves through it the themes that I've already given you.
The song is called Conversation with My Son. And in it, The author writes the following, we are all tumblers and beggars. This is a line from G.K. Chesterton's St.
Francis Assisi biography in which we are tumbling upside down, looking at this upside down world, and we are indeed beggars. And he said, the songwriter says, your mother and I will show you, my son, how to live a life that is full of being the tumblr and beggar. He says, we are gangsters and angels, and is that not true of all of us? We are the worst of beings and the best of beings.
Darling, come and see. The cross or the machine. It's always the same choice. The best I ever met, and here he is definitely referring to Jesus, had nothing and then gave that all away.
We'd rather be ruined than change. and we would rather die in our dread. And so here's his message to you and another W. H.
Auden line. Love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart. This is a sermon on dependence, learning to walk on your hands to see the world right side up. It is a sermon on illusions, letting the cross do its work, dying to the illusion that we are in control and giving over our very selves to God.
And it is a sermon about the cross, because this is indeed the only way home and the only way to fullness of life. Which lastly is all to say that this is a sermon about faith and trust. And it's why Jesus zings the disciples with the line that says, oh, you of little faith, because he wants them, I want you to grow in your faith, to grow dependence, to learn to see the world from God's kingdom perspective, to shatter the illusions of control and to trust and to have faith in God's ability to control the outcomes, the grand outcomes of your life. and to believe that He is enough.
And because He is enough, you become enough when you center yourself in His will. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, His Son, and Holy Spirit, Lord, we have each brought in our anxieties this morning. And they often overshadow the things that we do.
And they make us smaller. And they make us live lives that are indeed lives that lead to destruction. But God, you desire a better way, a way of fullness of life, a way in which we cast everything upon you, and we entrust our very lives to you. And so Lord, this morning, we bring it all.
We bring it all to the altar and to the cross. And we say once again, Lord, you are our Lord. We believe you, we serve you, and we give to you all the things that are dragging us down, both our worries and anxieties, but also our sins and our failures. And Lord, we trust that you are enough.
So this morning, Lord, release us from that. In Christ's name we pray, Amen.