“Cast your cares on the LORD and he will sustain you,” says Psalm 55:22.
Those words always challenge me—probably because I’m a person who takes responsibility seriously, which makes it easy for me to get up tight and carry around a load of cares.
Why do I carry my cares when God says to cast them on Him? There are a number of reasons. I think, “This problem is my responsibility.” What worrying does is make me feel like I’m at least doing something about it. Maybe I can fix this myself—and faster than God would do it. Maybe He won’t do anything about my concern anyway. Besides that, it’s scary to let go. Does that reasoning sound familiar to you?
There’s a verse in Hebrews, however, that says, “Do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward” (Hebrews 10:35, NKJV). God says, “Instead, cast your cares on Me.” But what do we do? We get it backwards. We cast away our confidence and carry away our cares!
Juan Carlos Ortiz tells about a lady who was coming to him for counseling but not making any progress. One day he said to her, “You’ve come here week after week and told me your problems. Today you’re going to sit there and listen to my problems–church problems, personal problems, financial problems.
Then he said, “Now, how to you think I cope with my problems?”
“Why,” she said, “you just roll them off on the Lord.”
“Exactly!” he exclaimed. “That’s what I’ve been trying to get you to do. Now get out of here and go do it!”
Sometimes we need to be told that we’re taking too much responsibility on ourselves—more than God intended. He knows that we’re not strong enough to carry our cares and carry out our tasks at the same time. So He gives us the solution. Our part—cast our cares on Him. His part: He will sustain us.
I think that sometimes we just need to hear those words, “Now get out of here and go do it!”
Leave a Reply