Silliness of Worry

In preparation for a sermon recently, I came across this passage in
Ecclesiastes:

If clouds are full of water, they pour rain upon the earth. Whether a
tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls,
there will it lie. Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks
at the clouds will not reap. –
Ecclesiastes
11:3-4

I pondered this verse for a while and then realized what Solomon was
getting at when he wrote it.

Things happen. Rain falls. Trees fall. If it’s time to rain, it will
rain. If a tree is gonna fall, it’s gonna fall. Things happen and there’s
nothing you and I can do about that.

However, there are some people who spend their lives looking for
things to happen-or to be more blunt, worrying about what’s going to
happen. It’s no good planting seeds when the wind is blowing hard because
the wind will simply carry all the seeds away. It’s no good trying to cut
hay when it’s raining, because wet hay can decompose so rapidly that it
will actually catch on fire from it’s own heat.

Those facts are true. There is nothing you can do about it. But the
passage in Ecclesiastes isn’t about whether the wind is blowing or the
clouds are raining. The passage is about those people who obsessively
look to the clouds and wind. The passage is about people who are
worried that it’s going to blow or it’s going to rain even if it isn’t!
If you spend all day worrying about the wind, you are never going to
plant, because the wind could pick up at any time. If you spend all day
looking at the clouds wondering if it will rain, you aren’t ever going to
reap, because it could rain at any time.

People who worry never get anything valuable accomplished because their
worries prevent them from doing what they could, and there is always
something to worry about!

“I’m not going to drive to work today because the tire on my car could go
flat while I’m on the tollway and then I’d have a wreck and maybe even
get killed.”

“I’m not going to invest in that stock because the stock market could go
down.”

Jesus told a story of three servants who were each given some talents
(amounts of money) to manage while the master was away. One servant was
so afraid of losing the talent, that he buried it in the backyard. It
never increased in value while the other two servants put their talents
to work and saw an increase. When the master returned, he was so
disappointed with that worried servant that he cast him out of his
home.

Wasting time worrying about the unknown is silly.

Worry prevents success.

In fact, an attitude of worry creates troubling situations!