Corrie ten Boom, Her Story
1. Prescription for Anxiety
Why should I feel discouraged, Why should the shadows come, Why should my heart be lonely And long for Heav'n and home, When Jesus is my portion? My constant Friend is He: His eye is on the sparrow. And I know He watches me.
"Let not your heart be troubled," His tender word I hear, And resting on His goodness, I lose my doubts and fear; Tho' by the path He leadeth But one step I may see: His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.
Whenever I am tempted, Whenever clouds arise, When songs give place to sighing, When hope within me dies, I draw the closer to Him, From care He sets me free; His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He cares for me.
MRS. C. D. MARTIN
This century has been called the Age of Anxiety. How fitting that description is! Everywhere I go, I find people tormented by inner tensions, nervous strain, worries, and fears. We are a generation of worriers, always taking pills to cure our anxieties and relax our nerves.
There is a great deal of difference between worry and concern, and we must realize this. Concern makes us do something to ease the situation. It moves us to take constructive action. But worry burdens our minds and bodies without helping us to find a solution to the problem. Worry is like racing the engine of an automobile without letting in the clutch. You burn energy, but you don't go anywhere.
No doctor has a cure for worry. Oh, he can give you an aspirin for your headache or something for your nervous stomach. He may even give you one pill for your tensions and another pill for your insomnia. But these are not cures. They just cover up the real problem.
There is a permanent cure for worry. The prescription is not mine—it was given by Jesus almost two thousand years ago, in His Sermon on the Mount. He devoted a great deal of this talk to the problem of anxiety. Therefore, here is His prescription for anxiety.
Remember the Power of God
A few weeks before the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus walked along the shore of the Sea of Galilee and called twelve men to lay down their fishing nets and follow Him. They would be His disciples. The men saw the presence of God in Jesus. They wanted to follow Him, but still, they had questions—many questions.
"If we don't fish for a living, how will we support our families?" "How can we be fishers of men? We're afraid to talk to other people." "How can we carry the Gospel to the world? Just the thought of doing that fills us with fear!"
Jesus went up on a mountain to escape the huge crowd that kept following Him. When He was ina private place, He sat down, gathering His disciples around Him. He began to teach them about the Kingdom of God. The disciples, who had followed Jesus for a little while now, knew He had no money of His own. Yet He never worried. He seemed content.
"What is the secret of happiness?" they asked. Jesus replied: ... don't worry about living—wondering what you are going to eat or drink, or what you are going to wear. Surely life is more important than food, and the body more important than the clothes you wear. Look at the birds in the sky. They never sow nor reap nor store away in barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Aren't you much more valuable to him than they are? Can any of you, however much he worries, make himself even a few inches taller? And why do you worry about clothes? Consider how the wild flowers grow. They neither work nor weave, but I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these! Now if God so clothes the flowers of the field, which are alive today and burnt in the stove tomorrow, is he not much more likely to clothe you, you "little-faiths?" So don't worry and don't keep saying, "What shall we eat, what shall we drink or what shall we wear?" That is what pagans are always looking for; your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all. Set your heart first on his kingdom and his goodness, and all
JESUS IS VICTOR
these things will come to you as a matter of course. Don't worry at all then about tomorrow. Tomorrow can worry about itself! One day's trouble is enough for one day.
Matthew 6:25-34 PHILLIPS
Actually, Jesus was chiding them a bit, saying "You already have life and a body, and they are far more important than what to eat and wear. Does it not follow that the God who is capable of making a human body is capable of putting clothes on it and providing food to keep it going?"
The next time you find yourself depressed or worried about some big problem, remember the power of God. Remember His great miracle of bringing you into being, and you will know He is more than able to care for you.
I remember reading a story about Bishop Quayle, who must have had a keen sense of humor. He told of a time when he sat up late in his study, worrying over many things. Finally the Lord came to him and said, "Quayle, you go to bed. I'll sit up the rest of the night."
A friend of mine told me, "When I worry, I go to the mirror and say to myself, 'This tremendous thing that worries me is beyond solution. It is even too hard for God to handle.' And then I smile."
Remember the Foolishness of Worry
Jesus had a way of asking embarrassing questions. "Which of you by taking thought can add one inch to your height?" Can you worry yourself taller? Or shorter? You might worry yourself dead, but never will you worry yourself happier. That comes by a different method.
Alcoholics Anonymous has sound advice to offer their people—advice all of us could use—in the prayer, "O God, give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."
I like that, for there are two things we should not worry about: the things we can change (we need to get busy and do something about these) and the things we cannot change (no amount of worry will help these). Instead, we should let God give us the courage and strength to master the unavoidable, for with God, nothing is impossible.
"Don't be fools; be wise: make the most of every opportunity you have for doing good. Don't act thoughtlessly, but try to find out and do whatever the Lord wants you to do" (Ephesians 5:16, 17).
Jesus says that God is concerned about us personally. "Look at the birds of the air," Jesus said to His disciples. "God feeds them in spite of the fact they cannot drive a tractor, plough a field, or work a harvesting machine. They can't even build barns to store the grain. Yet God takes care of each one of them." Then He turned to His disciples, and I imagine He had a slight smile on His face. "Are you not of more value than they?"
Next Jesus pointed to the wild flowers that were poking their heads around the rocks in the hard soil of Israel. "Look at them," He said. "They can't run a spindle or loom, they don't even have the ability to sit down at a sewing machine and make their own clothes. But see how beautifully God has dressed them. Why? Because God cares for even the grass of the field." Then He said, "If God so clothes the grass of the field, will he not much more clothe you?" (See Matthew 6:25-30.)
Count Your Blessings
I was in Japan, very tired, with a stomach that was upset from the unusual food. How I longed for a good European meal, a table where I would not have to sit cross-legged on the floor, and a soft bed instead of the hard mats the Japanese sleep on. I was filled with self-pity. I wanted to be back in Holland!
That night in church, while I was busy feeling sorry for myself, { saw a man in a wheelchair. After the service my interpreter took me down to meet the man, a bent little fellow with yellow skin and slender hands. His face wore the happiest expression I could imagine.
"What are those little packets on your lap?" I asked the man, pointing to several packages wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.
He broke into a wide grin and tenderly unwrapped one of the packages. It was a sheath of pages covered with Braille, the raised script of the blind. "This is the Gospel of John, written in Braille. I have just finished it," he said.
Then he continued. "This is the fifteenth time I have written the Gospel of John in Braille. | have also written other of the Gospels, as well as many shorter portions of the Bible."
"How did you come to do this?" "Do you know about the Bible women here in Japan?" he asked. "Bible women go from village to village, bringing copies of the Bible, books, and literature to those who are hungry for God. Our Bible woman is very ill with tuberculosis, but she travels every week to sixteen villages, even though she will soon die. When I heard about it, I asked the Lord what I could do to help her.
"Although my legs are paralyzed, and I cannot get out of the wheelchair, in many ways I am healthier than she. God showed me that though her hands are shaky and my legs paralyzed, I could be the hands, and she the legs. I punch out the pages of Braille, and she takes the Bible around to the villages and gives them to the blind people, who miss so much because they cannot see."
I left the church that night filled not with self-pity, but with shame. Here was I, with two good legs for traveling all over the world, two good lungs, and two good eyes, complaining because | didn't like the food!
These precious people had discovered a sure cure for self-pity—service to others.
Perhaps it is like the slogan I once saw on a church sign in America. "If you are unhappy with your lot in life, build a service station on it." The best antidote I know for self-pity is to help someone else who is worse off than you.
"I complained that I had no shoes, then I saw a man who had no legs, and I stopped complaining."
Walk With God
Does the Lord Jesus say, "Come along now. Take it easy. Don't worry," leaving us to realize that there have never been so many reasons to worry as there are now?
No! The Lord gives an answer.
"Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness" (see Matthew 6:33 kjv). It is your relationship with your heavenly Father that is important. That is what determines whether you will be victorious or defeated, however difficult the circumstances are.
The day after He fed the 5,000, Jesus chastised the crowd that followed Him, accusing them of following Him because He had fed them. "But you shouldn't be so concerned about perishable things like food. No, spend your energy seeking the eternal life that I, the Messiah, can give you. For God the Father has sent me for this very purpose" (John 6:27).
Still the crowd was more concerned with food. They asked Him to give them free bread every day, as Moses did in the desert. Jesus told them, "Moses didn't give it to them. My Father did. And now he offers you true Bread from heaven. The true Bread is a Person—the one sent by God from heaven, and he gives life to the world" (John 6:32, 33).
The crowd, still not understanding what Jesus was telling them, asked that they might have every day the bread He was describing.
"T am the Bread of Life. No one coming to me will ever be hungry again. Those believing in me will never thirst," Jesus told them (John 6:35). Although He said this over and over again to the crowd, they still failed to understand or accept. Many of His disciples left Him at this point. Jesus then turned and asked the twelve if they, too, were leaving Him.
Simon Peter answered for all of them: "Master, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words that give eternal life, and we believe them and know you are the holy Son of God" (John 6:68, 69). Peter and the others who stayed with Jesus knew what was important and what was not. They knew the way to victory.
With your hand in the Father's hand, you stand on victory ground. Give room for the Holy Spirit. He gives you the right outlook on troubling events. I know that from the time that I saw my sister Betsie starving in a prison camp. We were surrounded by people who had behind them a training in cruelties, but we had moments when we were conscious that we were walking with the Lord.
Often we had to go too early to roll call, which started at 3:30 a.m. Betsie and I would walk through the camp, and there were three of us present. Betsie said something, I said something, and the Lord said something. I can't tell you how, but both Betsie and I understood clearly what He said. These walks were a bit of heaven in the midst of hell. Everything around us was black and dark, but in us there was a light that belonged to eternity.
Jesus said:
All who listen to my instructions and follow them are wise, like a man who builds his house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents, and the floods rise and the storm winds beat against his house, it won't collapse, for it is built on rock.
Matthew 7:24, 25