Give Our Anxieties Away

Our lives are filled with cares, responsibilities, and worries. Work, finances, kids, health, church, friends, and our battle against temptation and indwelling sin. Each of those categories can be double-clicked to open a menu as long as The Cheesecake Factory’s.¹ Therefore, anxiety is not far away.

It’s no wonder Peter told us to find help from God by “casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7).

While working on a new book proposal, I did a deep dive on the Greek word ekballow—cast out, drive away, toss, remove. And while I was talking to my wife about it, she said, “Oooh, I wonder if it’s used in the ‘casting our anxieties on him.’ Look into that!”

Brilliant idea.

Turns out it’s not the same word. Bummer. However…

I learned a new angle on the word Peter used for how to understand “casting our anxieties on him.”

The word is only used twice in the New Testament. The other time is on Palm Sunday, when they threw cloaks on the donkey for Christ to ride into Jerusalem (Luke 19:35). Peter’s usage includes this and a little more.

Here’s how two Greek resources explained the other way to understand the word. They said it is an idiom that means:

• “to cause responsibility for something to be upon someone—‘to put responsibility on, to make responsible for’”²

• “to transfer one’s concerns”³

Peter is telling us to look at our cares, anxieties, and worries and transfer them to God. That’s incredible. God is inviting us—commanding us—to walk in the gift of saying, “Lord, I can’t handle this. I know you can. It’s yours. Take it. You are in control.”

When we are anxious, overwhelmed, and in need of help, we can engage the transfer portal. Peter wants to stress that we fully give our cares to God—give them to him in a way that he’s overseeing them. He’s in charge. He’s got the keys.

Jesus won’t do our jobs, raise our kids, and so forth. We have to live what God has called us to do. But we can take the stress, anxiety, and worry—and all of the micro-fears that can swell into meta-worries—and hand them over to God. “Please help me, Lord. I can’t manage this. You take it from here. I trust you to empower me.”

I find great relief in saying, knowing, and believing that God is in charge. Our Redeemer is incredibly responsible.

Transfer the responsibility of your cares to him. He takes care of the birds and flowers. He’s got us. Remember how Peter finishes the verse? “Because he cares for you.”

Maybe we ought to look at the one who calmly and slowly rode into Jerusalem. He took our sins. He reigns on the throne. He can handle our worries.

1. The Cheesecake Factory menu is over 20 pages long and contains 250 items. Insane.

2. Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996), 798.

3. William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 378. This source is also known as the BDAG.