The Cares of this World

Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you suddenly like a trap.

Luke 21:34

My grandfather had a great rule of thumb. He would tell me that if something wasn't going to make a difference in my life one year from now; then it wasn't worth worrying about. The truth is that most of us spend an exorbitant amount of time worrying about things that we won't even remember a year from now. Think about all the time you have wasted worrying over things that never amounted to anything! But Jesus reminds us that worry can cost us more than wasted time. If we aren't careful the cares of this life can distract us from the ultimate importance of eternal matters. 

In today's passage Jesus warns us about three things that can weigh our hearts down and cause us to be caught off guard on the day of His return: drunkenness, carousing, and the anxieties of life. It is easy to see how drunkenness could distract us as well as carousing. What comes as a surprise to me is the inclusion of the anxieties of life. We don't normally consider worry to be as dangerous as a drinking problem. I can imagine all manner of Christian friends rushing in to confront a fellow believer over drunkenness, but it's hard to imagine them rushing in to confront a believer about being weighed down by the cares of the world.

But the truth is that all three of these things come from the same root. They all grow out of a heart that is too focused on this world and not nearly focused enough on the next. When a believer gives in to his desires for the things of this world it causes him to either run headlong after these things (as is the case with drunkenness) or to worry over these things incessantly (as is the case with anxiety). Either such a believer's focus has been moved off of eternity and onto the things of this world. He has given this world more weight than it deserves. And the weightier this world seems to us, the more ethereal and abstract heaven appears. Conversely, the more heavily heaven weighs in our thoughts, the more the things of this world are exposed for the hollow shell that they really are.

Jesus' advice shows that my grandfather's rule actually doesn't go quite far enough. We must be careful not to be weighed down by the worries of this life at all. Jesus doesn't ask "Will it matter in a year?" but "Will it matter in eternity?" If not, then don't worry about it. All of us have to live in the reality of this world and sometimes that means doing things like paying bills and washing the car, but we must keep these things in their proper place. We cannot let them begin to push eternity out of our hearts and minds. We must not let the mundane and the meaningless so overwhelm us that we lose sight of our great hope in Christ's return. We dare not become experts in managing the temporary and forget to prepare for the eternal.

For further reading...

• Luke 8:1-15 (esp. vs 14)- The cares of this world can choke your growth in Christ.
• 1 Peter 5:7- Interestingly, this verses uses the same word for anxiety and tells the believer what she should do with her anxiety: cast it on the Lord.