Encore - 979 - How To Deal With Anxiety - 1 Peter 5:7

Hey, it's Mike Henry with Follower of One. Today I'm doing our podcast on both video and audio. And so you can hear this in both places and it will come out at different times, but our verse for today is 1 Peter 5:7 "casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you." Peter is talking to us, and he's telling us that we can cast our anxiety on him. In our previous episode, we were talking about being humble, and the humility is a key for this anxiety passing. We sometimes feel like we're the victims of anxiety. We're confident that we're not powerful enough to deal with our fear, and yet, it's not our fear that exceeds the power that we have. It's God who exceeds the anxiety and the fear that we have. When we humble ourselves and put ourselves in the right place, then we're in a position to be able to hand our anxiety to Jesus. We can give it to Him, because He cares for us, and He's powerful. In John 16:33, Jesus said: "These things I've spoken to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world, you will have trouble. But take courage, I have overcome the world." The trouble of the world does not exceed the authority of Jesus. And so even the true things that we fear, much less the anxiety, which is as Seth Godin called it "experiencing failure in advance", the anxiety is something that we can give away. We can give it back to Jesus. We can place that on Him because He cares for us. Today, I want to encourage us to go into our workplaces to pray, and to take that anxiety. If you have a big meeting coming up, or if you know you have a difficult conversation coming up. Or maybe it's a review that's going on. Cast that anxiety on him. Don't spend time experiencing your failures or your fears in advance, wait for them, and trust Jesus. He has this under control, and He will care for you in such a way that you can take that anxiety and put it on Him, and He will give you peace in its place. And use that peace to make a difference in the lives of the people that you work with. We do these things so that we can be ministers in our marketplace. A minister is just a servant. And so we give this anxiety away and we're back and we're free to be able to serve the people that we work with so that they might ask us, "Why are you doing this?" And we can tell them, "I'm doing this, and I'm peaceful because I trust Jesus, and He's working these things out in our lives and He can do that in yours as well." I'm so excited to get the chance to be a minister in the marketplace, a minister of Jesus Christ in the marketplace. I hope you join me. Ministry is helping other people move one notch closer to Jesus. And that's what we try and do at Follower of One. And so I want to encourage you to join me by going to followerofone.org and checking out our online community and signing up for the next marketplace mission trip. Thank you for being a minister in the marketplace and thank you for making a difference in the lives of others. Your ministry at work matters and it makes a difference to those around you. Thank you very much.