Sermon Quotes: "A Worrier's Guide to the Pandemic"

“Part of humility is willingness to patiently wait for things according to God’s timetable.” Edmond Hiebert

“Worry is a stealth sin. It doesn’t feel like sin.” Ed Welch

“Worry is a form of pride because when believers are filled with anxiety, they are convinced that they solve all the problems in their lives in their own strength. The only god they trust is themselves. When believers throw their worries upon God, they express their trust in his mighty hand, acknowledging that he is Lord and Sovereign over all of life.” Thomas Schreiner

“Worriers are visionaries minus the optimism. An experienced worrier can go for days leapfrogging from past to future and back again, never landing in the present. When they travel into the future they see it in Technicolor and vivid detail. Before they go for a routine physical they can hear the doctor pronouncing the dire diagnosis. They see the twisted metal of the imagined car accident. They watch the course of their life change after they fail a biology test, and they haven’t even taken it yet…It isn’t only children who should have warning labels put on their imagination!” Ed Welch

“'All your anxiety’ unites all the readers individual cares and concerns, whether due to memories of the past, pressures of the present, or fears concerning the future, into one burdensome whole. None of those anxious distracting concerns, prompting fear and worry, is excluded from the directive.” Edmond Hiebert

“Worry constitutes pride since it denies the care of a sovereign God.” Thomas Schreiner

“He handed over His own Son to bear the condemnation due to sinners. Here is the heart of the plan of God and the wonder of the gospel. The best of all men dies as though he was the worst of all criminals. Behind the handing over of the Lord Jesus--by Judas Iscariot, by Herod, by the priests, by Pontius Pilate--stood the purposes of His heavenly Father handing him over to the cross in order to die in the place of sinners. He bore God’s judgment and wrath against our sin. What inexpressible love this is. God can point to the cross and say: Do you see how much I love you?” Sinclair Ferguson

“It is our work to cast care, and it is God’s work to take care. By our immoderate anxiety we take his work out of his hand. Care, when it is either distrustful or distracting, is very dishonorable to God: it takes away his providence, as if he sat in heaven, and minded not what became of things below.” Thomas Watson