Anxiety
Daily Scripture
Matthew 6:25-34
25 “Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds in the sky. They don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are? 27 Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life? 28 And why do you worry about clothes? Notice how the lilies in the field grow. They don’t wear themselves out with work, and they don’t spin cloth. 29 But I say to you that even Solomon in all of his splendor wasn’t dressed like one of these. 30 If God dresses grass in the field so beautifully, even though it’s alive today and tomorrow it’s thrown into the furnace, won’t God do much more for you, you people of weak faith? 31 Therefore, don’t worry and say, ‘What are we going to eat?’ or ‘What are we going to drink?’ or ‘What are we going to wear?’ 32 Gentiles long for all these things. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 Instead, desire first and foremost God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore, stop worrying about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Daily Reflection & Prayer
Anxiety is one of the least productive emotions. A dictionary definition of anxiety is “apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill.” * It says “impending” or “anticipated”—anxiety usually means using up emotional energy about something that is not real and may never become real. In Inside Out 2, Anxiety says, “My job is to protect her from the scary stuff.” But anxious thoughts “often stem from our imagination and fear of the unknown.” **
- Research supports Jesus’ words about worry. Don Joseph Goewey wrote that “85 percent of what subjects worried about never happened, and with the 15 percent that did happen, 79 percent of subjects discovered either they could handle the difficulty better than expected, or the difficulty taught them a lesson worth learning.” *** Jesus said, “Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life?” If we know worry doesn’t do any good, why do we do it so often?
- In his classic The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis imagined the experienced tempter Screwtape urging his apprentice to “make [humans] live in the Future.” The reason? Because “the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.” **** Worry is nearly always about the past (‘I wish. . .”) or the future (“What if. . .”). In what ways did Jesus in today’s reading also draw us away from “living in the future” and toward building our life with God in the present?
Prayer
Lord Jesus, you created me with a brain that can worry if I choose to. Guide me to wiser choices, away from worry and toward trust in you. Amen.
GPS Insights
Janelle Gregory
Janelle Gregory, who serves as Resurrection's Human Resources Lead Director, wrote today's Insights. Janelle finds that her heart is constantly wrestling with the truth that she needs a Savior, and the times when she's at her very best are when she's just too tired to put up a fight.
© 2026 Resurrection: A United Methodist Church. All Rights Reserved.
Scripture quotations are taken from The Common English Bible ©2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
References
* From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anxiety
** From https://heywellness.com/anxiety-inside-out-2-quotes
*** Click here to see Goewey’s complete article.
**** Lewis, C. S., The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition (p. 75). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
