October 15 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading

Psalm 55:18–23

Devotional

Care, even when focused on legitimate matters, involves sin if it is carried to excess. Again and again Jesus exhorts his followers to avoid anxious care. The apostles reiterate the call. And it is a call that we cannot neglect without involving transgression.

Why? Because the very essence of anxious care is to imagine that we are wiser than God and to put ourselves in his place as if we could do for him what he has taken upon himself to do for us. We attempt to think of things that we imagine him forgetting and then we work to take upon ourselves a heavy burden, as if he were unable or unwilling to take it for us. Now this disobedience to his plain precept, this unbelief in his Word, this presumption that intrudes upon his domain, is all sinful.

But more than this, anxious care often leads to acts of sin. If we cannot calmly leave our affairs in God’s hand but attempt to carry our own burden, then we will be tempted to use wrong means to help ourselves. This sin leads to a forsaking of God as our counsellor and resorting instead to human wisdom. This is going to the broken cistern instead of to the Fountain of Life, a sin which God charged against Israel in the past (Jer. 2:13).

Anxiety makes us doubt God’s loving-kindness, and thus our love to him grows cold. We feel mistrust, and thus we grieve the Spirit of God. As a consequence, our prayers are hindered, our consistent example is spoiled, and our life becomes one of self-seeking. Such lack of confidence in God leads us to wander far from him. But if through simple faith in his promise we cast each burden as it comes upon him and are “not . . . anxious about anything” (Phil. 4:6) because he takes it on himself to care for us, it will keep us close to him and strengthen us against temptation. “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.” (Isa. 26:3).

[May 26, morning]

Extracted from C. H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening (public domain), language modernized by Larry E. Wilson.