Sometimes, if you will just wait, problems take care of themselves. J. Arthur Rank had a system for doing that. He was one of the early pioneers of the film industry in Great Britain, and he also happened to be a devout Christian.

Rank found he couldn’t push his worries out of his mind completely; they were always slipping back in. So he finally made a pact with God to limit his worrying to Wednesday. He even made himself a little Wednesday Worry Box and he placed it on his desk. Whenever a worry cropped up, Rank wrote it out and dropped it into the Wednesday Worry Box.

Would you like to know his amazing discovery? When Wednesday rolled around, he would open that box to find that only a third of the items he had written down were still worth worrying about. The rest had managed to resolve themselves.

If you have a troubled heart, ask God to give you a new perspective. Also ask Him to give you patience so you do not jump ahead and worry about a problem that may never come. Most important of all, ask God for more faith. Faith in God is the best remedy for all our problems. Jesus put it plainly, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in Me.”

(King Duncan, Collected Sermons, adapted from Daily Bread, Dec. 1, 1999. Cited by David Jeremiah, Slaying the Giants in Your Life, pp. 67-68)


View more sermon illustrations for inspiration for your next message.

Share this content with your peers!

Americans tend to be worriers. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 40 million Americans over the age of 18 are affected by anxiety disorders. If that is true, about one-fifth of American adults suffers from at least one type of anxiety disorder. It has become one of the most common types of mental illness in the free world today.

Professional counselors tend to believe worry, reduced to its simplest form, is an unhealthy and destructive mental habit. They say we were not born with the worry habit, but that we acquired it. They also say that because we can change our habits, we can cast worry from our minds. It is our decision to make.

The late Norman Vincent Peale was perhaps America’s most prolific writer on the subject of positive thinking. He said about worry, “Since aggressive, direct action is essential in the elimination process, there is just one proper time to begin an effective attack on worry, and that is now. So let us start breaking your worry habit at once.”

King Solomon must have agreed, He wrote, “So then, banish anxiety from your heart and cast off the troubles of your body” (Ecc. 11:10).

(from Tom Barnard’s Tuesday Mornings newsletter)


View more sermon illustrations for inspiration for your next message.