Philippians 4:6 – “Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.”
Why worry, when we can simply pray? Have you ever struggled with anxiety over something that you’re facing in life? Replace your worry with prayer and God will comfort. I am not saying to treat God as a genie, who answers your three wishes, but to come reverently before a holy God and commune with Him. The very act of prayer is humbling ourselves before God and acknowledging we need help. This will take whatever burden you have off yourself and place it at the feet of the Almighty God. This communion with God directs your eyes away from your problem and toward the wonderful God who guides and provides. For a Christian, anxiety melts away at the presence of God.
“For a great many of us the only notion that we have of prayer is asking God to give us something that we want. But there is a far higher region of communion than that, in which the soul seeks and finds, and sits and gazes, and aspiring possesses, and possessing aspires. Where there is no spoken petition for anything affecting outward life, there may be the prayer of contemplation such as the burning seraphs before the Throne do ever glow with. The prayer of silent submission, in which the will bows itself before God; the prayer of quiet trust, in which we do not so much seek as cleave; the prayer of still fruition, – these, in Paul’s conception of the true order, precede ”supplication.” And if we have such union with God, by realizing His presence, by aspiration after Himself, by trusting Him and submission to Him, then we have the victorious antagonist of all our anxieties, and the “cares that infest the day shall fold their tents” and “silently steal away.” For if a man has that union with God which is effected by such prayer as I have been describing, it gives him a fixed point on which to rest amidst all perturbations. It is like bringing a light into a chamber when thunder is growling outside, which prevents the flashing of the lightning from being seen.” (Alexander Maclaren)
