Worry

“What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.” Job 3:25
There’s been an idea floating around churches for some time now about ‘positive confessions’ and ‘negative confessions’. That is, that what we say, whether good or bad, will come to pass. If you are sick and keep claiming that you are healed, you will get better. If you express fear that you might lose your job, then you’ll lose it. But this is not how things work. It’s not a matter of cause and effect, that worrying about something makes it more likely to happen. But sometimes those things that we worry about do happen. For Job, it’s not clear what this was – whether it was losing his possessions, losing his children, losing his health, or having his wife turn against him.
There are all kinds of things we can worry about. Worry is fear of bad things happening in the future. It is the converse of regret: wishing bad things in the past hadn’t happened. Both of them will rob you of being able to enjoy life in the present. We can’t change the past, and we can’t control the future, so really there’s no point worrying about anything!
This is all very easy to say, but how do we stop worrying? Let’s see what Job did: he consoled himself that God was still sovereign. He acknowledged that his life was in God’s hands, to do with as He saw fit. The Bible tells us that God’s ultimate aim for each of us is good (Jer. 29:11). The path to get us to that goal might be difficult at times. But just stick close to the Lord, trust Him, and He will bring you through.