Very often, when Christians face hardships or problems, we’ll utter phrases like, “it’s ok, God’s got this.” We’ll say those things and then they proceed to shove our fears and worries into a part of our heart we don’t look at, a place we pretend doesn’t exist. And so our fears and worries mount and mount and mount and eventually explode in one way or another. “God is in control,” we keep saying as we lose control over everything, as our fears and anxieties and worries morph into anger and bitterness and a lack of self control.
Such is the danger of thinking in aphorisms, the danger of uttering little phrases not because we want to deepen our understanding of God’s promises but because we want to pretend that we’ve piously conquered our sorrows while we’ve actually just tried to hide from them.
But when St. Peter tells us to cast all our anxieties on God, this isn’t what he’s urging us to do. He’s not telling us to shout “it’s ok, everything is in God’s hands” to others while we build up that mountain of unresolved fears. He’s not telling us to be Christian performance artists who say things we don’t really believe to our believing friends so we can pretend we believe. Rather, Peter is inviting us to be real humans, people who cry and sob and shout and argue with God, demanding that He explain why things are the way they are when He’s promised otherwise. He’s inviting us to pray with the wild, unhinged despair of David and Jeremiah so that we can receive the glorious comfort from the same God who gave the balm of the Gospel to the apostles and prophets. To cast your every anxiety on God is to acknowledge your sorrows, to know that you’re still a Christian when they terrify you, and to trust that the day is coming when all that horror will fade away and the eternal victory of God will be yours forever.
Jesus Christ has died for your sins. He rose for your justification. He conquered this world of sin and sorrows and clothed you in the promise of His eternal victory in the waters of your baptism. Cast your every anxiety on him by dealing with your anxieties, by staring them in the face until you see the Lord kill them with His mercy.
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