One of the great ways of trying our hearts right now is asking how fearful are you?  How self-reliant are you?  I hear people say all the time, “We’re just trusting God.”  Hallelujah!  We could go through and look at numerous things in the Scriptures, but I found that God takes these general principles of guidance, the general revelation of His care for His people, His covenant people, and when there’s need for a specific word, God will speak to you specifically.  Otherwise, we continue on the general revelation, amen?

Here’s my general understanding: I’m not to worry about these things.  Did anybody else come out with that conclusion as we were reading these passages?  He specifically gives some examples and tells how much he cares for you.  And if He cares for the fowls of the earth, how much more, the crown of His creation, man, who was created in His own image?  There’s not one of these sparrows that can fall to the ground that God’s eye is not upon it, amen?  And you don’t think that He cares about you?  The disciples said, in the time of the storm, the first thing, “Master, don’t you care?”  The fact of the matter is, Jesus does care, but He knows His Father, and He knows the authority of His Word.  He said, let’s go to the other side.  And He laid down and went to sleep, knowing they were going to the other side, because He had mandated it.

My suggestion to us today is: let’s lie down by Jesus, go to sleep, and get to the other side; amen?  Stop worrying about everything, stop being afraid of everything.  “Well, what if there’s a reversal, and what if we can’t keep this kind of a lifestyle, and what if our children don’t have all that we have and more?”  Well, praise God, what if they don’t?  You know, maybe we ought to just follow the simple admonition.  We make it very clear to our children; they learn it from very young.  They have one law to follow, don’t they?  We talked about it before: children…  What?  Okay, how about if we just obeyed our Father?

Children, obey your parents.  Be anxious for nothing.  Take no thought for your life.  He says to us in another place, take no thought for tomorrow, amen?  Do any of you find yourself caught up in tomorrow?  If you are, the Word’s being choked out of your life.  This Spirit-filled walk that we’re in should be care-free.  I don’t mean we just act in obliviousness and just kind of walk blindly.  We know there are many other passages that will talk to us about preparation, about the hand of the diligent bearing rule, amen?  So, we don’t just lie back and wait for God to dump blessings on us.  We know that these blessings of God come through our faith and our obedience.  Deuteronomy 28 is a good chapter to refresh your minds with periodically.

The foundation of what these thorny vines are doing on a daily basis to rob the Word of God out of your heart!  And tragically, we ignore the signs of that.  We see His care for each of us and that His eyes are upon us.  He talks about the flowers of the field and that no man was ever clothed in more beauty and grandeur than just a field of wildflowers—the color, the beauty.  He gives us insight here and puts His finger on the situation when He says, “O ye of little faith.”  We want to raise the dead, we want to cast out devils, we want to move mountains, we want to make declarations of the power of God on our behalf, supernaturally opening doors for our prosperity and bringing divine healing into our lives, and yet we find ourselves worrying?

The compulsion to add one more zero to whatever it is we have set aside.  “Dear God, my savings is down, and one more zero would really help that.  A hundred would look way better than ten.  And if I could get one hundred bucks in savings, man, now I feel secure now.”  There was a day, not too long ago, when that was a big issue, (wasn’t it?) to get that ten to a hundred.  I’ve had less than $10 in savings before, and I know many of you have.  How much do you need, until God really becomes God?  When can I just say, “I’ve laid up enough now that I can just rest and let God be God.  The Lord is so good.  Now, I can sleep tonight because I added that one more zero that finally did the job.  And now I can rest in the Lord.”  How much do you need?

We go to one another and say, “Hey man, I found this new stock, and it’s something that is going to do X in a certain period of time.”  “Really?  Let’s discuss it.”  We look, and we study it, and we get on, and we follow, and we’re seeing how things are doing.  Well, I’ve got something for you to invest in, too: my God will meet all of your needs according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.  What are you going to do with that news?  You going to run and try and get somebody in on that one, one of your buddies?  “Hey, guess what man.  I found out this new thing:  God will meet all of your needs according to His riches in glory.”  Are you as excited about carrying that message?  And it chokes the Word of God out of our lives.  You can’t serve God and mammon.