The Ravens and the Lilies

Scripture is the King James Version. The other voices are read from public-domain sources — A. W. Pink's The Attributes of God (1930), the Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), and the classic quotation collections (Hoyt's Cyclopedia, Day's Collacon). Quotations drawn from OCR sources were checked against their originals.

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: anxiety — and the ravens, and the lilies, and the God who feeds them.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

The last hour of the day is the hour worry comes for us. The work is done, the house goes quiet, the lights go low — and into that silence, unbidden, walks tomorrow. The bill. The test result. The child. The conversation you have to have. The thing you cannot fix tonight and cannot stop turning over. If you are lying awake tonight with a mind that will not be still, this hour is for you. We are going to take up the oldest and most stubborn of human troubles — the anxious mind — and we are going to hear how the wise have spoken to it, and how the birds outside your window have already answered it, and how One who bore every sorrow we know, yet without a moment of sinful fear, once stood in a field and pointed at the flowers.

We begin where the whole conversation must begin, with the gentlest command in the Scriptures, spoken by a man on his way to the cross to people who had every earthly reason to be afraid. Jesus, in the Gospel according to Luke, turns to his friends and tells them, of all things, to look at the birds.

Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on. The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment. Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls? And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit? If ye then be not able to do that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest? Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and to morrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith? And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind. For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: and your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Consider the ravens. Consider the lilies. It is not an argument from strength; it is an argument from smallness. He does not point us to the lion or the eagle, the mighty and the self-sufficient. He points us to a raven, which owns nothing, and a wildflower, which will be dead by winter — and he says, look how they are clothed, look how they are fed. Notice the hinge of the whole thing: "God feedeth them." The raven does not feed itself. It has no storehouse, no barn, no plan for the future — and it is fed, every single day, by a hand it never sees. That is the argument. Not "try harder," but "look who is holding you."

And here we ought to pause on that phrase, "God feedeth them," because a good and careful writer once spent his life meditating on exactly this — on the goodness of God as it reaches down even to the sparrow and the raven. Arthur Pink, weighing the goodness of God, saw that it is not confined to the people who pray to Him; it spills over onto everything that breathes.

From Pink:

Nor is the goodness of the Creator confined to man: it is exercised toward all His creatures. The eyes of all wait upon Thee; and Thou givest them their meat in due season. Thou openest Thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing.

The eyes of all wait upon Thee. Every raven at dawn, every fox in its den, every fish in the dark of the sea — all of them, without knowing it, are waiting on an open hand. And Pink presses further, into a truth we almost never consider: that no living thing has the power to keep itself alive for a single hour.

He writes:

Consider God's power in preservation. No creature has power to preserve itself. Both man and beast would perish if there were not herbs for food.

Both man and beast would perish. You did not make the wheat grow that became your bread tonight. You did not hang the rain, or tilt the earth toward the sun, or set your own heart beating while you slept last night — it beat on its own, seventy times a minute, tended by Someone while you were unconscious and helpless and worried about nothing at all. The whole machinery of your survival runs, most of the time, entirely without you. And Pink noticed something tender in the way God does it — that He did not merely keep us alive, He made being alive a pleasure:

The goodness of God is seen in the variety of natural pleasures which He has provided for His creatures. God might have been pleased to satisfy our hunger without the food being pleasing to our palates.

He did not have to make bread taste good. Hunger could have been met with something gray and sufficient. Instead there is bread, and butter, and the smell of coffee, and the particular gold of late light through a window — a thousand small kindnesses scattered through an ordinary day by a God who could have made survival joyless and chose not to. This is the God who feeds the ravens. And the argument of Jesus is simply: if He does that for a bird that owns nothing, what makes you think He has forgotten you?

He came back to this so often that His friends must have known it by heart. In the Sermon on the Mount He said it again, in nearly the same breath, pointing this time at the birds overhead:

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Are ye not much better than they? He does not argue that you are worth nothing; He argues that you are worth more — more than the sparrow, more than the raven, more than the lily that outshines Solomon and is gone by evening. And He says it twice, in two different sermons, because He knew we would need to hear it far more than twice: the lesson of the birds is one the anxious heart forgets by every nightfall, and must be taught again with every sunrise.

Now, the strange and humbling thing is that the world outside the Scriptures also saw the anxious mind clearly — saw it, named it, diagnosed it with real precision — long before and quite apart from any word about a Father. The old philosophers hated worry, and they studied it like a disease. Hear Seneca, the Roman, put his finger on exactly where the wound is:

The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.

Anxious about the future. That is the whole address of worry — it does not live in the present, where things are usually bearable; it lives in tomorrow, in a tomorrow that has not come and mostly never comes. And his fellow Stoic, Epictetus, a man born a slave, made the diagnosis even sharper, and located the trouble not in the world but in us:

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death, that it is terrible. When, therefore, we are hindered or disturbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves — that is, to our own views.

We are disturbed not by things, but by the views we take of them. The event is one thing; the dread we wrap around it is another, and the dread is our own manufacture. Two people receive the same news; one is destroyed and one is calm — so it cannot be the news alone that destroys. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, who governed the whole Roman world and still had to fight his own anxious mind at night, wrote himself this reminder:

Why should any of these things that happen externally so much distract thee? Give thyself leisure to learn some good thing, and cease roving and wandering to and fro.

Cease roving and wandering to and fro. That is what the anxious mind does — it roves, it wanders, it goes out to meet a hundred troubles that have not arrived. And Marcus set beside that restlessness the one fact that cuts every anxiety down to its true size — that each of us is only ever a breath from the end, so that today is the only ground we actually stand on:

Whatsoever thou dost affect, whatsoever thou dost project, so do, and so project all, as one who, for aught thou knowest, may at this very present depart out of this life.

As one who may at this very present depart. It is a bracing thought, not a morbid one: if today may be the last day, then to spend it rehearsing tomorrow's imagined disasters is a strange and wasteful way to hold something so brief and so precious. And the Roman poet Lucretius saw that no amount of power or wealth buys you out of it; worry follows the mighty into their palaces:

The alarms and cares that nestle in the breast of man are not dispersed by the noise and fierce contests of war; they boldly take up their abode in the breast of kings and the powerful of the earth.

They nestle in the breast of kings. Worry is no respecter of persons; the crown does not keep it out. So the ancient world saw the disease with astonishing clarity — that it lives in the future, that it lives in our opinions and not the facts, that it nests even in kings. What they could not do was cure it. They could tell you to stop; they could not tell you that Someone was watching over you. They had a diagnosis and no Father. They could say, "the future is uncertain, so be brave"; they could not say, "the future is held, so be at peace." That word waited for a field, and some birds, and a Man who said, "your Father knoweth."

Between the cold diagnosis and the Father's cure stand the quieter voices — the moralists and old divines who wrote, not about the mechanism of worry, but about the beauty of the soul that has escaped it. They kept returning to one word: quiet. Hear an old writer named Crabb name the single thing that most settles a troubled mind:

Nothing contributes so much to serenity of mind as a pervading sense of God's good providence.

A pervading sense of God's good providence. Not a technique, not a breathing exercise, not the mere passage of time — but a settled, soaking, background certainty that the world is being governed, and governed well, by One who is good. Where that certainty pervades, serenity follows almost by itself. Another old writer, Cave, put the reward almost impossibly high:

He that troubles not himself with anxious thoughts for more than is necessary, lives little less than the life of angels.

The life of angels. To lay down the anxious thought is to live, for a moment, the untroubled life of heaven itself. And Laurence Sterne, who knew grief well, found in every human lot, however bitter, some small mercy mixed in:

There is scarce any lot so low but there is something in it to satisfy the man whom it has befallen; Providence having so ordered things that in every man's cup, how bitter soever, there are some cordial drops.

In every man's cup, how bitter soever, some cordial drops. Even tonight, in whatever cup you are holding, there are cordial drops if you will look for them — mixed in on purpose, by a hand that would not send the bitterness undiluted. But the loveliest image of the quiet soul comes from the Puritan Thomas Brooks, who compared the settled heart to a ship at rest:

The still and quiet soul is like a ship that lies quiet in the harbour. You may take in what goods you please whilst the ship lies still; so, when the soul lies quiet under the hand of God, it is most fitted to receive whatever good He would pour in.

A ship in the harbour. A tossing ship can take nothing on board; the cargo would spill, the ropes would snap. It is only the still ship, moored and quiet, that can be filled. And so it is with you: it is not the frantic, roving, anxious soul that receives the good God means to give, but the one that has come into harbour and lies still under His hand. Worry, it turns out, does not only torment us — it empties us; it keeps us in the open sea where nothing can be loaded in.

The old writers also watched what care does to a person over time — how it moves in, and settles, and takes the place over. Goethe saw it colonize the human heart:

Care straightway nestles in the deep heart of man, hatches undefined sorrows there, and, rocking ceaselessly, scares away joy and rest.

It hatches undefined sorrows — and that is the peculiar cruelty of it. Not the real, defined trouble you could name and act on, but undefined ones, vague dreads with no shape and no solution, rocked ceaselessly like a thing that will not let the cradle be still. And it is self-defeating even on its own terms: the very wealth that anxiety works so hard to gather becomes only one more thing to be anxious about. The old writer Quesnel put it with dry precision — Care may acquire wealth, which, when acquired, care must guard and worry about. Care gets the thing, and then must sit up all night guarding the thing; it never arrives at rest, because the very having breeds a new fearing. And a writer named Mrs. Lyman said the whole of it in four words: unceasing care is very worrying. We smile — and then we catch ourselves, at midnight, worrying about how much we worry.

Which brings us to the particular shape of nearly all our worry, the thing the poets kept circling: that we do not fear today. Today is almost always survivable. We fear tomorrow. William Cowper knew that an idle, empty mind is the worst soil for it —

Absence of occupation is not rest; a mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd.

— and the old poets scolded the folly of borrowing on a day that has not come. "To-morrow, didst thou say?" wrote one of them, and treated tomorrow as a swindler who takes today's peace as payment and delivers nothing. This is precisely the folly Jesus names — worry is a loan we take out against a future that belongs entirely to God, at ruinous interest, and the debt is always paid in the one coin we cannot get back: today.

And the poets felt the helplessness of it — that the troubled mind seems to have no cure of its own making. Beaumont and Fletcher cried out at the injustice of it: Nature too unkind, that made no medicine for a troubled mind! There is no herb for it, no tincture, no remedy that grows in any earthly garden. Men have tried to laugh it off — a marching song from the trenches of the Great War told a whole generation to pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile — and God bless the courage in that; but a song cannot finally empty the kit-bag, it can only ask you to carry it with a straighter face. The troubled mind has no medicine of its own making. Which is why, when the Lord returns to the theme in Matthew's Gospel, He forbids exactly this — the reach into tomorrow:

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Sufficient unto the day. Today's trouble is enough for today, and today's grace is enough for today's trouble — but only today's. Grace is not stored; it is served fresh, like the manna in the wilderness that could not be hoarded overnight.

There is a deeper root under our worry that we should name, because Jesus named it too — He set this whole teaching against covetousness, against the wanting of more. Anxiety and greed are twins: the more we believe our happiness depends on having, and getting, and keeping, the more terrified we become of losing. The cure the Scriptures prescribe for that fever is a strange and unfashionable virtue — contentment. Paul, writing from a prison cell of all places, could say:

Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

I have learned to be content. Learned — it did not come to him naturally any more than it comes to us; it was a schooling, and the classroom was hardship. And he tells his young friend Timothy where the real wealth lies:

Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.

We brought nothing in; we carry nothing out. Everything we lie awake trying to secure is on loan, and the lease ends the same day for all of us. And the letter to the Hebrews ties contentment straight to the one thing that finally dissolves fear — not a fuller account, but a Person who will not leave:

Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear.

Be content — for He hath said, I will never leave thee. The ground of a quiet heart is not that you have enough things; it is that you have Him, and He is not going anywhere. Which exposes the anxious striving that keeps us up at night as not merely useless but faithless — as the Psalmist saw, in words made for this exact hour:

Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.

He giveth his beloved sleep. There is the promise for tonight, in seven words. The man who lies awake building his house alone and keeping his own city — rising early, sitting up late, eating the bread of sorrows in a frenzy of self-reliance — labours in vain. But to His beloved He gives sleep; not as a wage earned by anxious effort, but as a gift to the trusting. The beloved sleeps, because Someone else is keeping the city all night long.

And this is the great turn of the whole night — the moment the wisdom of the world runs out and the word of God goes further. Because the philosophers said "stop worrying," and stopped there. But the Scriptures do not say merely "stop." They say: do something with it. Take it somewhere. Put it down — onto Someone.

Hear the apostle Paul, and notice he does not say "be calm"; he says "pray":

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

Be careful for nothing. Be anxious for nothing. But the space where the anxiety was is not left empty — it is filled with prayer, and the result is not a peace you manufacture by effort but a peace that comes down from outside you, that passes understanding, that stands guard — the word is a military one — that garrisons your heart and mind like soldiers at a gate. And Peter says the same, in the plainest image of all — not "manage" your care, but throw it:

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.

Cast it. Hurl it. The whole weight of it, off your own back and onto His, because — and here is the reason, the only reason that finally works — He careth for you. Not "because worry is irrational," though it is. Not "because it never helped," though it never did. But because there is Someone strong enough to carry what is crushing you, and He is not indifferent to you. The Psalmist knew it three thousand years ago:

Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.

And when the burden is tomorrow — the unknown, the un-arrived — the Scriptures answer even that, with the promise that the mercy will be there when the morning is, and not one hour before:

It is of the LORD'S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.

New every morning. You do not have tomorrow's mercy tonight, and that is exactly why you cannot face tomorrow tonight — you are trying to walk a road on rations you have not been issued yet. But when tomorrow comes, its mercy will come with it, fresh, sufficient, waiting at the door with the dawn. Great is thy faithfulness. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait. There is that word again — quietly. The quiet soul, the ship in the harbour, waiting.

And now we come to the bottom of it, to the thing the ravens knew and the philosophers did not. Twice in that field the Lord gave the reason underneath the reason. First: your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. And then, the tenderest line He ever spoke to the fearful:

Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Fear not, little flock. This is what the Stoic could never say. Epictetus could tell you the universe was indifferent and you must be brave inside its indifference. Marcus could tell you to shrink your desires until nothing could hurt you. But Jesus tells you the universe is not indifferent at all — that behind the weather and the wheat and the beating of your heart there is a Father, and it is His good pleasure — His delight, His joy — to give you not merely bread, but a kingdom. Worry, in the end, is not first a nervous condition; it is a theological one. It is what we do when we have quietly stopped believing we have a Father. The pagan worries because, as far as he can tell, no one is home. The child of God has no such excuse, and no such need — for Someone is home, and He is good, and He is near, and He has already given His own Son to prove it. And this is the argument the apostle Paul makes, and it is simply unanswerable:

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?

Follow that, because it is the deepest medicine there is for a fearful heart. The hardest, costliest, most unimaginable thing God could ever have given, He has already given — His own Son, delivered up, at the cross, holding nothing back in the dark when it was hardest. And if He did not flinch there, at the greatest price, is He now going to balk at the small daily provisions — the bread, the raiment, the strength to face the morning? The reasoning runs from the greater to the lesser and it cannot be broken: the God who gave you Golgotha will not forget your groceries. If He gave you the cross, will He forget your rent? If He fed the raven this morning, has He overlooked you tonight? Every raven fed is a small echo of Calvary; every sunrise is a receipt, stamped and dated, on a debt already paid.

So the Lord ends where we began, in the field, with the birds — and He offers, at the last, not a technique but Himself:

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Come unto me. Not "figure it out." Not "be strong." Come. Bring the whole heavy, sleepless load of it, and lay it down here, tonight, and find rest — not rest earned, but rest given, by the only One who ever bore the whole weight of the world without a moment of sinful fear, and now offers His own calm to you like a shared cloak. The birds outside your window will wake before you tomorrow, and they will sing — not because they have solved anything, but because they were fed yesterday and they trust they will be fed again. Go, and do likewise. Consider the ravens. Consider the lilies. And carry it all to Him.

We close with the hymn a grieving man named Joseph Scriven wrote to comfort his mother across an ocean — a hymn that has quieted more anxious hearts than perhaps any other ever written, because it says the one thing worth saying to a worried soul at the end of the day: take it to the Lord.

What a friend we have in Jesus, All our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege to carry Everything to God in prayer! O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear, All because we do not carry Everything to God in prayer!

Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged; Take it to the Lord in prayer. Can we find a friend so faithful Who will all our sorrows share? Jesus knows our every weakness; Take it to the Lord in prayer.

Are we weak and heavy laden, Cumbered with a load of care? Precious Saviour, still our refuge— Take it to the Lord in prayer. Do thy friends despise, forsake thee? Take it to the Lord in prayer! In His arms He'll take and shield thee; Thou wilt find a solace there.

Put it down. He is holding you already. Good night.