The Demon of Worry # 2

The Demon of Worry # 2

O, the records that faces bear! As our eyes grow wise to see, what confessions, fain hidden, stand out from the faces of the crowd! And no demon drives his pitiless graver deeper, nor with more certain stroke, then the hateful demon worry. And the lines he makes are ignoble lines; lines; lines in which he who runs may read the story of happiness of homes eaten away by little and little as with a biting acid; of home made hateful to husband and children; of love worn to the breaking point - and all about things that pass and perish with the day; things of no vital moment; things upon which neither the true happiness nor honor nor usefulness of life depend. O, the pity of it. O, the miserable shame of it, that on a face made beautiful by God there should be ignoble worry marks!

Suppose such an one had trusted God about all those causes of anxiety. Suppose such an one had said: "My Father feeds the birds; He clothes the flowers; He will assuredly feed me and mine; He will clothe us." Ah, the happy spirits with the other gravers would have written on that face other lines - lines of serenity, lines of happy trust, lines which would have made the face a benediction and a blessed memory.

Thirdly, Christ reminds the anxious one of earth that, after all, worry does no good.

"Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?" (Matthew 6:27).

The waste of it! The uselessness of it! All the worry that ever got itself accomplished in this weary, worrying world; all the sleepless nights, all  the burdened days; all the joyless, mirthless, peace-destroying, health-destroying, happiness destroying, love destroying hours that men and women have ever in all earth's centuries given to worry, never wrought one good thing. It was all evil and only evil. It shut out the face of God, the loveliness of nature, the joy of love, the compensations of life. It poisoned the peace of others and cast its hateful shadow over other lives. The very point of the sin of worry, the very reason why it is the basest, most cowardly of sins, is that it darkens the lives we are most responsible to bless - and all for no good, but only to blight and wrong.

The amazing thing about it is that no one is convicted of this mean sin! Good people live in it, and with no sense of the outrage which it involves against the love of a kind, heavenly Father and against the rights of others! A Christian man will not scruple to bring to his home the petty worries and passing anxieties of the day. Christian women - women whose lives are pure, who scorn scandal, who devote life and strength unsparingly to the service of husband and children, will yet shamelessly poison the peace of the home by the sin of worry, and with no apparent sense of the guilt of it! It is one of the mysteries of human nature.

"Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." (Matthew 6:34).

~C. I. Scofield~

(The End)
________________________

There Is The Image of Christ!

"Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5).

Press right home to your conscience the question, "What do I have of the mind of Christ?" Does my heart answer, does my disposition correspond, to the holy, meek, humble, forgiving, benevolent, patient, self-denying mind of Christ? Do men who know the beauty and glory of the Original, as it is delineated on the page of the gospel, when they see me, say, There is the image of Christ!"

Or do they look skeptically on, and after standing in silence for some time, profess they can see little little or no resemblance? Oh, be satisfied with nothing short of a copy of Christ's heart into yours!

~John Angell James~