H.B. Charles told the Alabama Baptist Pastors Conference that when Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians, he wrote as though he knew his readers would have things on their mind.
“He assumes we have come in here tonight with worries, and the Bible says stop it,” said Charles, pastor-teacher at Shiloh Metropolitan Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, as he spoke to pastors Nov. 13 at Taylor Road Baptist Church in Montgomery. “What did you come in the room tonight worried about? Your health, your family, your finances, your ministry, your future? God’s word to you and to me tonight is to stop worrying.”
Philippians 4:6–7 instructs followers of Christ not to be anxious about anything but to pray about everything, Charles said.
“Take everything off of your worry list tonight and put it all on your prayer list,” he said. “Every time you are tempted to worry, stop and take that matter to God in prayer … you really can pray your worries away.”
Prayer and worry are as opposed to one another as water and fire are, Charles said. “The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful in everything.”
Nothing is too large for God, he said.
“No matter how overwhelming it may seem to you, that thing that you’re worried about that you left back home, there is nothing too big for God to handle … and there’s nothing too small for God to care about,” Charles said.
Practice and discipline
He compared the habit of giving anxieties over to God to that of learning to play a musical instrument — the more you practice, the more you can do it with freedom.
Charles said it’s tempting to want “the freedom that comes from a powerful prayer life without putting in the discipline to cultivate a healthy prayer life before God.”
Prayer is a privilege, but it takes practice and discipline, he said. “Prayer begins with a heart that seeks to spend time with God. … Do not let the pressures and the busyness and the activities of ministry squeeze out your personal time of communion with the living God.”
Prayer is also an exercise in trust, Charles said. “A healthy prayer life is the result of a heart of dependence upon God.”
That’s why believers are often better at praying when they’re in trouble, he said, but he warned against a “crisis Christianity.”
“Too many spiritual leaders are functional atheists,” he said. “They’ll get on Twitter and denounce everybody who denies the existence of God, yet we run our ministry in our own wisdom, strength and resources as if we are sufficient in ourselves.”
God at work in our lives
Charles suggested that maybe sometimes behind it all “it is God’s hand at work in our life to show us the hard way that you aren’t as big and bad as you think you are.”
God allows things to get overwhelming, sometimes to a point where pastors will stretch out their hands and say He is their only hope, Charles said.
In addition to praying with trust, God wants us to pray with thanksgiving — before we know the answer, he said.
“I think this passage exposes us to something that we’re not honest about, brothers — the heart of anxiety is often rooted in a spirit of ingratitude,” Charles said.
Where there is no praise, there is no peace, he said.
“If God was a stingy God, we would be grateful for every little blessing we could squeeze out of His miserly hand,” Charles said. “But because God is so lavish in His love, we are prone to take His grace for granted and complain when things don’t go our way. A heart of gratitude will chase away the spirit of anxiety.”
‘God will respond’
If we pray, God will respond, but He may not respond the way we want Him to, Charles said.
Pointing to verse 7, he said the peace of God will guard our hearts and minds in Jesus.
“There’s a promise of answered prayer here, brothers, but there is no promise God will change anything in your circumstances,” Charles said.
That could mean no healing, no provision, no deliverance, no miracles, no rescue.
“Instead He’s saying, while He leads you into circumstances, He is able to provide peace that surpasses all understanding,” Charles said. “Here the promise is not a promise of divine intervention as much as it is a promise of divine insulation, where the war is raging around you but He gives your heart and mind a peace that surpasses all understanding.”
What’s happening within you is more important than what’s happening around you or to you, he said.
“What He has actually done is marshal His peace and made His peace the watchman over your heart and mind so that you can lose your job without using your joy, so you can lose your friends without losing your faith, so you can lose your health without losing your hope,” Charles said.
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