Do you feel as if the weight of life gets heavier as each year passes? What happens when a global pandemic takes place? In this video, Pastor David Platt illustrates how a pandemic can add to the anxiety of life, but that God’s Word can lighten our loads. Pastor Platt explains that many people accumulate anxiety throughout their lives. We live our lives wearing a heavy backpack of cares and worries about the future. When we are met by large misfortunes like a pandemic, we find that we are carrying more than we can handle. In light of this, Pastor Platt exhorts believers to hope in God, thus casting their cares on him.
- Carrying Anxiety and Worry
- Pandemic Adding to Our Load
- A Good Word
Watch Full Message of Peace in the Middle of a Pandemic (Part 1)
Peace in a Pandemic
I’ve talked before about hiking in the Himalayas, so based on this verse I kind of picture a pack that I have that I take when I go hiking, and I picture anxieties in light of Proverbs 12:25 like putting a weight in a pack.
So I think about children and teenagers. From early in life we worry, we are anxious about what other people think about us. And as much as we’d like to think that goes away, the reality is it’s hidden pretty deep within us and affects what we do in many ways throughout our lives, what do people think about us, the constant anxiety about that. Or as students we start to think through well, am I going to get into this school, so we kind of put that in a pack, or once we get into a school am I going to get this job, so we take that, put it in a pack.
Dealing With Anxiety
Then we start to think okay, am I going to get married, and we’re anxious about if we’re going to get married or who we might get married to. Then there comes anxiety about whether or not we are going to stay married and how marriage is going to go. In marriage maybe we start getting anxious about whether or not we’re going to have children, so that’s another whole level of anxiety.
Then when we have children we start getting anxious about how those kids are going to turn out, and so we start putting some anxiety there. We haven’t even gotten to anxiety about our finances and how we’re going to pay the bills, put that in here, or anxiety about our future and what the next year holds, next two years, next three years hold.
Anxiety like this can turn into a stream of worries, of what ifs that we start thinking through in our mind as we start going down a road. Just think of an example. We start thinking, okay, what if I don’t have extra money to get my kids braces? Well that’s some anxiety, because I know braces cost a lot of money. If I don’t have that extra money, then what’s going to happen if my kids have crooked teeth? That’s some extra anxiety. Then we start thinking if my kids have crooked teeth maybe that’s going to keep them from getting a job or getting married, so there’s some extra anxiety. Or then maybe if that is true and they can’t get a job or can’t get married, then that means they’re going to live with me the rest of their lives because I wasn’t able to get them braces.
Filling up our Bag of Life
So all of a sudden things just start piling on and we have a pretty full pack, and I’ve just mentioned general things, not even getting into the specific things in each of our lives that we get concerned about. So we’re already anxious, like our pack is full, and then along comes a pandemic, the worldwide spread of a new disease. So our packs are already full, now we’re going to take a whole nother bag and fill it full with all the anxieties that come with a pandemic. So let’s think through money wise what is our financial situation going to look like? What is our economy going to look like? So let’s throw this in the pandemic bag.
What about school? When it comes to books are we going to be able to finish our education? What does that look like? What about work? How is this going to play out at my work? So we put that in the bag. Or what about our health? Will I have enough medicine? So let’s put that in the bag. Will I have enough food and essential resources that I need? And then maybe what seems to be the most pressing question, will I have enough toilet paper? So let’s put that in the bag.
So now we have a global pandemic.
Letting Christ Lighten our Bags
Our bag is already full, so now we’re going to load on some more and we’re just going to stuff that in here, and this is going to become the picture of our lives right now. In light of Proverbs 12:25 we have a picture of you, me, our lives, our families, weighed down with anxieties on so many different levels. This is the picture of us. Do you feel like this sometimes? Maybe do you feel like this right now? I think many of us do. I look around people’s faces and having conversations with people, and there’s just a heaviness with all kinds of things in life, and then you add a global pandemic on top of that.
Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad, and this is why this verse came to my mind this week, because I’m looking out online across our city. I know a host of different people carrying a host of different weights, and I want to give you a good word that makes you glad.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
