Remember the Birds
Hi. My name is David, and I’m an anxious person. In fact, just saying that makes me a little anxious.
Mostly, I worry about everything. I wake up worrying, and I go to sleep worrying, and in between, I worry some more. I even worry about worrying about the right things. What if I forget something and my family doesn’t have what they need when the time comes? What if, by my failure to worry, I lead us straight into hardship? What if I fail them?
It’s a miserable way to live, honestly. But it’s my way.
I know it’s not the way I’m meant to live. I worry about that as well. I need to change, but it’s hard. In this kind of world, how can one not be a little anxious all the time?
Who can save me from this body of death?
THE CURE FOR ANXIETY
The Bible, of course, isn’t silent in the face of anxiety. It’s well known that the most repeated command in scripture is “Do not fear.”
There is a whole section in the most famous sermon ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus addresses this issue. I’ve read it a thousand times. Maybe you have, too. But, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to point out something that has changed my life. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic (that’s an anxiety trait, I know), but it has made a bigger difference in my mental health than anything else ever has. And the thing is, it’s been there for thousands of years.
The key verse in this whole thing for me is Matthew 6:26. The ESV heading for this little section is “Do Not Be Anxious,” which, honestly, gives me anxiety. I like the CSB heading better: “The Cure for Anxiety.” That’s much less anxiety-inducing. Maybe the cure will work. Maybe it won’t. But that’s not up to me. So, let’s try it out, shall we?
CONSIDER THE BIRDS
Matthew 6:26 is such a simple verse. “Consider the birds of the sky: They don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they?”
Tim Keller used to say that good preaching connects an intellectual truth to a sensory experience. Jesus was a good preacher, of course, so he knew this too. That’s what he did in this verse. We are anxious people, constantly worrying about provision. Will we have enough tomorrow? Will we be okay? The intellectual truth that God will care for us takes us only so far. We need some sensory experience to help us actually believe it.
In fly the birds. I imagine it like a Disney movie. Right on cue, a bird or two flitters in and perches beside the crowd. They turn their heads from side to side, as birds do. They tweet (but not the annoying hot-take kind). They look again to the side and toward the ground, hop off their perch, grab a seed, and fly off with a chirp. Illustration complete.
They didn’t sow or reap or gather into barns. God fed them. They had all they needed.
AREN’T YOU WORTH MORE?
This is a classic “from lesser to greater” illustration. Since God cares for the lesser thing, he will, of course, care for the greater thing. If the birds (the lesser thing) are cared for by God, won’t you (the greater thing) be cared for as well?
God loves using this kind of logic. If the blood of goats and bulls sanctify, how much more will the blood of Christ (Heb. 9:13-14)? If evil parents know how to give their children good gifts, how much more does God (Matt. 7:11)? If God did not spare his own Son, will he not with him freely give us all things (Rom. 8:32)?
The logical move from lesser to greater is the kind of thing that helps us see how secure we are in Christ. God is not letting us fall through the cracks.
BACK TO THE BIRDS
Back to the birds for a minute. Do you know how many birds there are in the world? I asked myself that question the other day. So, I Googled it. National Geographic is the first result with my answer, and it’s quite a doozy. “New research estimates there are between 50 billion and 430 billion birds on Earth.”[1]
That’s quite an estimate. There’s a massive difference between those two numbers. But for the sake of our article here, let’s just go with the lowest number. 50 billion birds.
The thing about big numbers like that is that our brains can’t properly recognize them. What I mean is that we don’t see how big they truly are. We reduce them. So, let’s put the numbers on another scale. How many years are 50 billion seconds? Answer: 1,585 years. If you wanted to count to a billion, it would take you a little over 95 years to do so. So, counting to 50 billion would be something that my Excel document wouldn’t even show the full number for. Stack a billion dollars on top of one another, and you reach the lower portion of the troposphere, one of the outer layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s about 68 miles. I guess 50 billion takes you into a galaxy far, far away.
Do you see the point? 50 billion birds are a lot of birds. And that’s the low estimate.
YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER
Why are there 50 billion birds in the world? Partly because that gives us 50 billion reasons to trust God with our lives. That’s Jesus’s point in Matthew 6:26. We do not have a meager amount of care. We have millenniums worth. We have galaxies worth.
The next time you step outside, look for the birds. You don’t even have to look. You can listen for them. They’re out there flying around, making music, gathering sticks for nests, poking at the ground for worms. They’re doing just fine, and they always will be because God loves them.
And he loves me. He loves you.
He wants us to know that way deep down. He wants us to trust him with our lives. He wants us to know that he cares for us today, tomorrow, and into eternity.
We do not have a cold, distant deity sitting idly by, watching us worry and work. We have a heavenly Father who loves us more than he loves the birds, who cares for us more deeply than we do even for ourselves, and who wants us to know how deep his love is.
So, he gave us the birds.
The next time you are anxious, consider them, and through them, remember your Father who loves you.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-many-birds-are-there-in-the-world-science-estimates
