Worry is utterly useless.  It never serves a good purpose.  It brings no good results.  “Which of you can by being anxious add a single span to the measure of his life?” Jesus asks in that sixth of Matthew.  But much more can be said. It brings bad results.  The revision brings out the clear, simple meaning of the Thirty-seventh Psalm, eighth verse.  The old version seems a bit puzzling, “Fret not thyself in anywise to do evil.”  The revision reads, “Fret not thyself, it tendeth only to evil doing.”  The results of worrying are always bad.  The judgment is impaired.  One cannot think so clearly nor see so clearly.  The temper is ruffled.  The door is quickly opened to worse things.

It is sinful to worry.  For the Master repeatedly commands us, “Be not anxious.”  It helps to get a habit labeled correctly.  Here to tack on “sinful” in block letters, black ink, white paper, so as to get greatest contrast is a decided help.  And worrying is a reproach upon Jesus.  Let the Gentiles, the outsiders, the people who have not taken Jesus into their lives, let them worry if they will.  But we must not.  For we have Jesus.  Let these who leave Him out grow crow-toes, and deeply-bitten wrinkles, and turkey-foot markings.  Without Him how can they help themselves?  But we folk who have Jesus should have smoothly rounded faces, the lines all filled up and ironed out.  It reproaches Jesus before folks for us to be as they are in this regard.

Out of the midst of a great pressure of work, with a body tired out, Dr. Charles F. Deems, the busy pastor of The Church of The Strangers in New York City, wrote these lines years ago: 

    “The world is wide,
      In time and tide,
    And God is quick;
      Then do not hurry.

    “That man is blest,
      Who does his best,
    And leaves the rest;
      Then do not worry.”

A man should do his best.  There should be no shirking.  Yet I need hardly say that here, because shirking people, lazy people do not worry.  They haven’t enough snap about them to worry.  But it steadies one to put the thing just as Dr. Deems put it. “Do your best, and, then leave all the rest to God.”  And when sleep time comes, sleep.

Anxious for Nothing.

Likely as not some one will say, “We knew all that before.  But how are we going to quit worrying?  That’s what we need to be told.”  Well, I can tell you.  Sometimes a man speaks cautiously, but here one can speak with great positiveness.  There are three simple rules how not to worry.  They are infallible.  I heard of a society whose purpose it was to cure worry.  There were thirty-seven rules, I think.  It would worry some of us a good bit to memorize any such length of instruction as that.  The remedy seems to be on a high shelf.  And in standing up on a chair and reaching there is some danger that the chair may tip over and the last state not be an improvement on the first.