Telling the Truth

Guest (Male): Today Jill Briscoe shares an encouraging message about something we all deal with at times: worry. And uncovers biblical truth on how you can defeat it. She begins in just a moment.

In their new five-message series, Fighting Unseen Forces, Stuart and Jill show you straight from God’s Word how you can stand strong against your spiritual enemy and live victoriously in Christ. We’ll send you a copy of this resource as our thanks for your support today to help others experience the life of abundance God wants them to have in Jesus.

So call today to request your copy of Fighting Unseen Forces: 1-800-889-5388. That’s 1-800-889-5388. Or you can give online at tellingthetruth.org. Now, here’s Jill with her message, “Winning the Worry War.”

Jill Briscoe: Winning the Worry War. I don’t know if you’re a worrier; Joshua was. And when I think of him going round and round and round and round Jericho, to me that is a wonderful picture—and I work in pictures and think in pictures—of what I have done all of my life. A Jericho appears, and I go round and round and round and round and don’t seem to be able to stop.

How do we win this worry war? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Now, as I’ve just mentioned, I am a worry woman. When I was a little girl, I was worried I would never be a big girl. And then I did; I grew up. And then I worried I’d never get married. And I did. I remember going on the way to the wedding, worrying I’d have a crash and never get there.

And I got married, and then I worried I’d never have children. I didn’t worry very long; in 10 months, David appeared. But I did remember worrying. And then, of course, once I had children, I worried they’d fall into the washing machine and drown. I’m blessed—or cursed—with a very vivid imagination, and it can be a blessing or a curse. Well, they didn’t; they grew up.

Well, I did worry they wouldn’t grow up and be big children and big people. And I did worry they wouldn’t get married. And on the way to their weddings, I worried that they would have a crash and wouldn’t get there. And then I worried they’d never have children, and I didn’t need to worry about that either.

However, it’s never over. And of course, the older you get, the more you have to worry about. I’m really worried I’m running out of time to worry. My time is shortening all the time, and worry time is running out on me. Some of us, of course, are worriers by nature. I’m a worrier by nature; my husband is not a worrier by nature, and it’s good to try and marry one of those if you’re a worrier, I think. He says I do enough worrying for the whole family, so why should he bother?

Even today, I woke up very, very early in the morning because I probably have more to worry about at this point of my life than I have ever, ever had to worry about. In fact, I have. But among my personal worries, I was worried that my car didn’t have enough gas to get here, which it didn’t. However, I didn’t have time to stop, but I took time to stop. And then I worried I’d be late, which I was.

I was worried about this talk that I hadn’t had enough time to shake it down and get it into shape. I remember once—and I’ve always worried about every talk I’ve given—saying to Stuart, "I’m worried about this talk." "Well, what are you worried about?" "Well, the devil's telling me it’s not very interesting." "How do you know it’s the devil?" he said. Thanks.

I was worried about my grandson’s birthday because I had managed to go to the older brother’s birthday, and I hadn’t gone to his. And I’d talked to him in the morning; he’s only four, and he’d said, "Why are you not coming to my birthday?" So I was worried about hurting him and that he would grow up with a complex. I’m worried about a 300-page book I have to write before May, and I haven’t started it yet. I’m worried about the meetings I go to.

I’m just a worrier. Now, I know I’m not alone. And whether you’re a big worrier or a little worrier, I know that we have a world of worriers out here. But the thing is, worry and fear are sisters. And what I see the devil doing is the worry begins, and he jumps on the back of it and turns it into terror, paralyzing fear. And that’s a very common thing. So we are to fight our fears, win the worry war, and these are battle terms.

Fighting our fears—there is a battle going on. And the devil wants us to worry. The devil wants to terrify us. "God has not given you the spirit of fear," the Bible says. So if you have a spirit of fear, if you’re obsessed by worry, who’s given it to you? And since when did you receive gifts from the devil? God has not given you this obsession, this fear, this terror; somebody else has given it to you. And we are not to receive the gifts of the evil one. God says that we will win this Jericho if we fight it His way.

Now Joshua, facing this Jericho, was worrying. He was worrying—I’m sure he was worrying about the past. I mean, think of it: 40 years, and they’d never won a battle. They didn’t have a very good track record. And now he’s facing the biggest battle that they’ve faced in 40 years. So he’s looking to the past as a lot of failure, and he’s saying, "How can I win the present battle?" And he’s worrying about things he can do nothing about. He can’t go back and win the battle.

We often think about that: "If only I could go back and do it differently, if only I could go back," etc. You can’t do that. You only have today; you do not have tomorrow, you do not have yesterday. So I’ve not a doubt that he was thinking about the 40 years of failure. But God can break the cycle. There can be a point where you take Jericho, even though you’ve failed and failed and failed and failed in the past.

And when I’m talking to people who are adult children of alcoholics, I always say that. God can break the cycle; that’s the difference. And I’m a worrier, as much of a worrier today as I was when I was a little girl without Christ. But the difference now is I have Christ, and He never worries. For this, I have Jesus.

And the difference for the Christian isn’t that He is going to change your character and suddenly you’re going to become somebody that never worries. He will not change your personality. I remember my daughter crying for two days when a psychologist told her that, because she is a worrier. "Thank you, Mother; you gave it to me," she says. And I’m sure I did, and a bit more of her own. But when she was told she would always be who she was—a worrier—she had to accept that.

That was the turning point for her. Now Christ would help her with her personality. Now Christ would help her cope, but she would never be like anyone else. She would never be like her brothers, who never worried—her younger brother, anyway. "Why can’t I be like Pete? Why can’t I be like somebody else? Why? Why does it matter so much to me that I always get an A, that I’m always perfect? Why? Why can’t I be like somebody else?" No. But now you have Jesus.

And He will take the destructive part of worry and help you to shape it into constructive concern. So worry is not going to disappear, but what you do with them is going to change. God is the potter, and He’s going to shape your worries into prayers. He’s going to shape your worries into another shape. And when you look at them after He’s finished with them, they will look different. And they will always look smaller. One thing the divine potter does with our worries: He always crushes them up and gets them into perspective for us.

Guest (Male): This is Telling the Truth with Stuart and Jill Briscoe. Today, Jill is examining the book of Joshua to uncover how Joshua won the war on worry and what his example teaches you about how you can win your war against it. She’ll be right back.

Between the pressures of paying bills, taking care of your family, and keeping up with a chaotic calendar, it’s easy to feel outnumbered and overmatched. And those are just the visible challenges you face each day. The unseen forces of evil can make life seem even more overwhelming, threatening your spiritual, emotional, and relational well-being.

But you’re not without help and hope. And in their new five-message series, Fighting Unseen Forces, Stuart and Jill Briscoe show you how you can live victoriously, knowing that with Christ and His Spirit, you’re never alone. This new series is our thanks for your gift of support to help more people experience life through the resources and teaching of Telling the Truth.

Generous friends like you keep broadcasts like this one today going, even reaching people in places that are closed to the gospel. So if you haven’t given before, now is a great time to jump in and help keep God’s Word going out around the world to you and many others. And remember to request your copy of Fighting Unseen Forces when you call and give. Just call 1-800-889-5388. 1-800-889-5388. Or you can give online when you visit tellingthetruth.org. Now, let’s get back to Jill.

Jill Briscoe: So Joshua, looking back, was told by God in Joshua chapter one—if you would turn to it, and that will be our main text today. Verse six: "Be strong and courageous." Verse seven: "Be strong and very courageous." Verse eight: "Be careful to do everything that’s written in the law." "Have not," verse nine, "I commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be disgorged of courage, discouraged." That’s what the word means. "For the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go."

And the devil’s design is to take the heart out of us. Paul talks in the New Testament about losing heart, discouragement. And there are many, many people who are discouraged. Many, many people whose hearts are failing them with fear. Many, many people looking at Jericho, saying, "What a mess is in my past. What fears are in my future. How can I ever, today, go around Jericho?"

But you see, we’re only called to deal with the fears of today. You know, when Jesus was talking about fear and discouragement and worry in Matthew chapter six, which is a classic passage where He’s talking about, "Don't worry about clothes and don't worry about food and don't worry about this and don't worry about that." He comes to the end of the passage and He says, "Sufficient for today are the worries. I have got enough worries; I have measured them out." And there is no way you can cope with the worries that you’re worrying about in tomorrow. All you’ve got to do is worry about the worries in today.

Now, when worries appear in front of me, I think of them as grandchildren—two-year-old grandchildren—who are tantruming. And when you get a two-year-old who’s tantruming, all your attention is on this little thing. Now, what do you do with a child that tantrums? Well, there are various things you can do: you can ignore them and wait until it’s over; you can try and control it; you can try and interject something that will help the child get through it or stop the tantrum. You can do all sorts of things.

What happens to me when my worries are tantruming, just demanding I’m obsessed and my attention and everything is on it? Then I ask it a question: "Do you belong in today, or do you belong in tomorrow?" And if that tantrum, that worry, belongs in tomorrow, I say, "I’m sorry, I have to ignore you. I cannot attend to you. Jesus said, 'Do not worry about tomorrow.'"

Now then, the child might answer me, "I belong in today." Then I am allowed to address it. I’m allowed to worry about it God’s way. I am allowed to react, respond, to let the potter take that child, that worry, that tantrum, and mold it into a shape that I can understand and cope with and respond to, and turn the destructive worry into constructive concern.

Paul said, "I am concerned about all the churches." And the same word is used. The word that is used in the Bible for anxiety is *merimnao*. And it means an anxiety that obsesses so you can’t think about anything else. The same word is used when it’s used in healthy concern. The same word. And yet, it has been changed; God has done something for it. He commends us to be concerned about the needs of the world. He tells us to be worried about people that are in need, for example, or that are lost. There is a healthy concern.

It’s when it becomes obsessive and when you cannot function, and when nobody else—you can’t see anybody else. What happens to me when I am not handling worry properly is I can’t function. I just can’t think about anything else; I can’t pray about anything else. I wake up with it, and I go round and round and round Jericho, and I can’t stop. And God says that has to be stopped.

Now, it has to be stopped for obvious reasons; it has to be stopped for our sake. You know when Martha was anxious and worried about many things? She was obsessed with the soup. It’s incredible to me what you can be worried about. It really is. Actually, it doesn’t matter whether the worry is little or the worry is big; the devil doesn’t care. He just wants to distract you. Distract you from what? From God and from who God wants you to be. And he wants you not to be free from worry, but to turn your worries into prayers.

Something struck me, and does strike me, that there’s one thing common to man, and that’s temptation. And there is a temptation to worry, to be anxious. And if we fall into that temptation, then we sin. Worry is sin. Worry is universal; secondly, worry is sin. And that has really always helped me. "Martha, Martha, you’re distracted and worried about many things. One thing is needful." Mary has chosen that. What is that? It’s attending to the things of God; it’s putting Him first.

Let me define worry for you quickly. A feeling of uneasiness, apprehension, or dread. And it’s often related to negative thinking about the future. Worry superimposes the future on the present. And it also empties today of its strength. Because seeing you’ve superimposed the future on the present, you are now worrying about it, and you’re spending all this energy worrying about something that you’ve taken out of the future and brought into the present.

Something that might never happen because 90% of what we’re worrying about never happens, we’re told. Now I’ll talk about the 10% that does in a minute, but the 90% of what we worry about never happens. I remember when my daughter was a teenager, worrying about the whole dating thing because I had just arrived from England and I didn’t understand the system. Only America has the dating system, and I didn’t know how it worked. I didn’t know anything. You know, when you’re out of your culture, you don’t know anything.

Like, I’d ring a friend and say, "Is it safe that Judy gets on a bike and goes from this point to that point?" I didn’t know if it was safe. You know, it’s just—I would have known at home if I could have let her ride a bike such and such, but I didn’t know here. So then when we hit the dating thing, and this young man appears at 15—and I have just led him to Christ and know exactly what he’s like, and now I see that he only has eyes for my 13-year-old daughter—I panic. I start to worry; I start to go round and round and round Jericho. And I wake up with it, and I go to bed with it.

So what am I going to do with this worry? Well, I superimposed the future on the present: what might happen. Right. And because I have a good imagination, that can be a blessing and a curse. And so, of course, I’ve had the funeral by now. Oh dear. And I remember Judy sitting me down and saying, "Mother, we have to talk. Why don’t we pray that all my mistakes will be small ones?" That was wisdom for a 15-year-old.

By now, she was two years later; I had slapped a 15 thing on her. My youth pastor—I called my youth pastor up and said, "What do I do? I have this daughter that wants to date; she’s 13, he’s 15, and he’s not the sort of boy I want her dating." She said, "Oh, just slap a 15 on her, you know, you can't date until you're 15." So I slapped the 15 on her. And on her 15th birthday, there he was on the doorstep with a bunch of flowers saying, "Mrs. Briscoe, you said when she was 15 I could date her." So I’d had two years to go round and round and round Jericho by now.

So this was difficult; this was tough. And at this point, she went to a dance. Now, in England, you don’t dance if you’re a Christian. You know, I used to dance every night before I was a believer, but when I was saved, that was it; I never danced again. And that’s just one of those cultural Christian things. But here, you go to these school dances. And what’s more, the parents go and watch the beginning of the dance.

I drag my husband along, and there was my daughter with this boy, and suddenly they do this slow dance and all the girls' heads go down on their shoulders. I couldn’t stand it. Here was this boy with his arms around my daughter and her head obediently on his shoulder. You know, it’s just like this thing, and at the end of the dance, they all come up. I’m in shock. Absolute shock. I can’t handle this. And of course, I have superimposed the future on the present, and there is more than a head on a shoulder. I’ve already got her pregnant, and what are we going to do with the baby and all of that.

Guest (Male): This is Telling the Truth. Today, Jill is looking at how the Old Testament hero Joshua experienced worry and what his example teaches you about how you can win your war against it. She’ll be right back.

Between the pressures of paying bills, taking care of your family, and keeping up with a chaotic calendar, it’s easy to feel outnumbered and overmatched. And those are just the visible challenges you face each day. The unseen forces of evil can make life seem even more overwhelming, threatening your spiritual, emotional, and relational well-being.

But you’re not without help and hope. And in their new five-message series, Fighting Unseen Forces, Stuart and Jill Briscoe show you how you can live victoriously, knowing that with Christ and His Spirit, you’re never alone. This new series is our thanks for your gift of support to help more people experience life through the resources and teaching of Telling the Truth.

Generous friends like you keep broadcasts like this one today going, even reaching people in places that are closed to the gospel. So if you haven’t given before, now is a great time to jump in and help keep God’s Word going out around the world to you and many others. And remember to request your copy of Fighting Unseen Forces when you call and give. Just call 1-800-889-5388. 1-800-889-5388. Or you can give online when you visit tellingthetruth.org. Now, here’s Jill with some final thoughts on today’s teaching.

Jill Briscoe: Round and round and round Jericho. I remember the first time after that she went out on a date, I was behind the door and I said, "Take me with you, Judy. Take me with you." "Oh, Mother!" Well, she wouldn’t take me with her. And that’s the essence of worry: you’re out of control. You cannot control. You can try; you cannot be God.

God is omniscient; He knows everything. God is omnipotent; He’s got the power to do everything. God is omnipresent; He’s everywhere. And mothers try to be God. They want to know everything: "Who’s on the phone? What’s this letter about?" They want to be everywhere: "Take me with you." You can’t be in the car, you can’t be on the date, you can’t be at the party, you can’t be at the movie theater.

And we want to control; we want to have the power to control. And yet, parenting is about giving control to the child, helping them make their own good choices, that all their mistakes may be small ones. But it doesn’t eradicate the worry. And I remember going at this point to a conference in Michigan called Winning Women, where I was the guest speaker. And I had to talk about faith, and I was busy worrying.

But of course, I was supposed to stand up and tell everybody how not to do it. And I went into the prayer room at that conference where there was a wonderful prayer ministry and a woman called Margaret who became a lifelong friend that day. And I had shared a little picture that God had given me from the Scripture. You know, when Joshua went round and round and round Jericho, he took the Ark with him. He took the Word of God, and that’s what you’ve got to do when you’re going round and round your problem: "Lord, I’m taking the Ark with me. What do You say to me?"

And that day, God had said to me from Exodus, Moses' mother, desperately worried about Moses, the baby, couldn’t hide him any longer. She put him in the ark and let him go among the crocodiles. And I said to Margaret, "That’s what I feel like. I feel that I’ve got to let her go. And I feel all these nice little boys I thought were so cute at church are like crocodiles. They’ve turned into these crocodiles." And she said, "Well, you’ve put her in the ark, put her in Christ. You’ve got to let her go. But," she said, "I’ll be Miriam. I’ll stand on the bank, and I’ll watch your daughter."

Guest (Male): Before we go, we want to remind you that this month, when you give to support Telling the Truth broadcasts like this one today, we’ll send you Stuart and Jill Briscoe’s five-message series, Fighting Unseen Forces. This powerful new series will help you stand strong in Christ and in the power of His Spirit against the enemy so you can live victoriously each day.

Please request your series when you call and give. Just call 1-800-889-5388. 1-800-889-5388. Or you can give online when you visit tellingthetruth.org. Be sure to come back tomorrow as Jill continues her message, "Winning the Worry War," and turns to the New Testament for more help in defeating worry. That’s tomorrow, here on Telling the Truth.