The Problem of Self-Reliance: How Worry Robs Us from God

This week I was speaking to someone in our church, from our church, who mentioned that their daughter is thinking about watching the movie It. It Two, I think, is out at the moment or coming out soon. It's that scary movie, the scary story based on the Stephen King novel about that scary clown. And now this particular mum mentioned that their daughter in particular has a love-hate relationship with scary movies. On the one hand, she loves watching them for the adrenaline rush that it causes.

The excitement, the anticipation that comes from watching them. But on the other hand, she hates the consequences of watching those movies. Because it means that when she gets home, she has to turn on every light in the house. She has to go and look behind every door and check under the bed to make sure there isn't some zombie or some scary-looking doll lurking around. Some of us may also know that love-hate relationship with scary movies.

Now I'm not particularly a fan of scary movies. Not that I get scared. Let me just put that out there. I have to justify myself now. Not that I get scared, but I think it's a lazy trick to get people scared.

You know, you watch those movies and it's classic. I mean, they send one person on their own into like this scary corner of the house. It's, you know, the violin music, and then all of a sudden, they just sort of screech and you're like, ugh. It's just, I think, lazy cinematography. But the most perplexing thing for me that I don't get about scary movie fans is how they know they will be scared afterwards, but they still watch it.

But that's what fear does, doesn't it? Fear exaggerates things. The quiet little suburban street that you have lived in for twenty years, now all of a sudden in our minds becomes the next bloody murder scene of a crazy possessed doll that goes and attacks you. We have never had crime in our neighbourhood, but all of a sudden rational people start believing that there's going to be the next, you know, I don't know, chainsaw murderer coming to your house. Of course the reality is, most of the stuff that we worry about after a scary movie never comes to pass.

They are thoughts and they are fears that cause us to exaggerate things beyond what is reality. But it is a common phenomenon, isn't it? But fear goes beyond scary movies. And fear, that is sort of manifested in the idea of worry. Worry, rooted in fear, is the single biggest issue I think we face as human beings. But because it is such a big issue for us as human beings, thankfully, God has also talked about it a lot in the Bible.

So this morning we're going to look at a very scary situation for God's people. We've already talked about them: Israel, a people of a certain time and space. And we're going to look at the circumstance a little bit, and then we're going to see what God promises to those He loves. So we're going to look at Isaiah 31, and we're going to read from verse one through to verse five.

Isaiah chapter 31, verse one. God says, woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong. But do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord. And yet He, who is God, is wise and brings disaster. He does not call back His words but will arise against the house of the evildoers and against the helpers of those who work iniquity.

The Egyptians are men and not God. Their horses are flesh and not spirit. When the Lord stretches out His hand, the helper will stumble and he who is helped will fall and they will all perish together. For thus the Lord said to me, as a lion or a young lion growls over his prey and when a band of shepherds is called out against him, he is not terrified by their shouting or daunted at their noise. So the Lord of hosts will come down to fight on Mount Zion and on its hill.

Like birds hovering, so the Lord of hosts will protect Jerusalem. He will protect and deliver it. He will spare and rescue it. So far our reading. So just to get a bit of a historical pinpoint on what's happening here, this is written roughly in the year 700 BC.

At this point in time, the nation, the people group of Israel, were in a serious predicament, a very serious predicament. They were starting to hear the threat of war coming their way. Around this time, the nation, the empire of Assyria had started growing and growing and growing from the north—the Middle East, which is sort of now the Iran-Iraq area. And they had been growing and obviously Syria. So they had been growing and growing and growing, and now they were starting to invade countries as they were wanting to expand their territory.

And the great prize in that time was to come down south to the fertile, beautiful nation of Egypt. We don't think about Egypt being fertile, but along the Nile it was the most fertile place in the known world. And they wanted Egypt. And guess who was in the way? The little nation of Israel.

And so they're hearing this threat. They're hearing about the colossus of Assyria coming down and potentially capturing them. And so it's in this time that Isaiah 31 is written. At this time, God raises a prophet by the name of Isaiah to warn the people of Israel that they were facing doom and destruction not simply because of this empire, but because they had turned away from God. They had fallen into idolatry.

They had rebelled against God in their obedience to Him and they had started worshipping the idols, the gods of their neighbours. And so Isaiah throughout this book calls them to return to God, calls them to repentance and faith and obedience. As you read the letters and the preaching of Isaiah through this part of Scripture, however, you get the understanding that Isaiah's call goes unheard. And so when we come to chapter 31, we see Israel's leaders seemingly making plans to ally themselves with Egypt and to face the onslaught of the Assyrians together. This is what's happening politically at this time.

And God is speaking through the prophet Isaiah saying, don't make yourself reliant on them. Don't be self-reliant on your plans. Who are the Egyptians? What can they do? Come back to Me.

Come back to Me. Seek Me out. I am your rescuer. I am your deliverer. And so for us this morning, I think we can take some really, really valuable points from this idea of self-sufficiency and worry.

Verses one through three is a perfect picture of self-sufficiency. It hopes that by clever political dealings, through political insight and knowledge, a great solution can be made. But as you read these verses, you see how it constantly is weighing up Egypt with God. Can Egypt do this? Is Egypt like this?

God says in verse one, woe, woe to those who go down to Egypt for their help, who trust in the multitude of their chariots and in the great strength of their horsemen, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or seek help from the Lord. Woe to you, he says. Not just, oh, that's a bad idea. Horrible, terrifying things will happen to you if you look to Egypt for help, trusting in their military strength, but do not go to the God of Israel first. Verse two continues with a sense of tongue-in-cheek humour that he says that God is also wise.

Remember Moses and the wise men of Egypt? You remember that fight with the staff and the snake? Egypt were known for their academia. Egypt were known for their knowledge, their wisdom. But God is also wise.

God also can strategise and plan and work things out. But God is better than these wise men because God doesn't take back His words. Like humans who make mistakes, once God acts, He makes no errors in judgment. Verse three, but the Egyptians, it continues, are men and not God. Their horses are flesh and not spirit.

When the Lord stretches out His hand like a king directing the troops, he who helps will stumble. Egypt, the one who helps will stumble. And he who is helped will fall and they will perish together. In other words, you may draw upon the strength of your earthly saviour, Egypt. They may come to help you, but I am the God of both the helper and the helpee. And I can cause both of you to stumble and I can cause both of you to fall.

What God is really dealing with here is not about political intrigue. It's not about, you know, nation versus nation. God is dealing here with the sin of self-sufficiency. You see, there are basically two roots of sin in mankind. Two parts of us, where every sin you can imagine comes from.

One is to make God be like us. In other words, make God small, to make Him out to think like us, act like us, do like us. And the other is to make us like God. To think that we have the power, we have the influence and control.

Any sin, think about it. Any sin in our lives can be tied back to these two causes. I have either tried to make God smaller than He is, or I've tried to make myself god of my life, of other people's lives. And this is what Isaiah 31 is accusing the people of Israel of: the sin of self-sufficiency. And so the question we have to ask ourselves is why is this so dangerous?

Why is God so serious about this? I mean, isn't it good to make plans? Why is God so sternly warning His people about this? Well, because the sin of self-sufficiency can cause at least three things.

Firstly, self-sufficiency causes us to go to God less because we don't feel the urgency to ask God for His help or intervention. We pray less when we are self-reliant. Secondly, the sin of self-sufficiency causes us to worship less, to actually worship less because we are not aware of God and His power. We think what has happened is somehow tied to us or luck.

God doesn't receive the thanks. God doesn't receive the honour. He doesn't receive the glory for what has happened. We worship less as self-reliant people. And then thirdly, it causes us not to be vulnerable with fellow believers, with brothers and sisters, people who are closer to us than anyone else can really be.

We are not vulnerable, enabling them to carry our burden, the thing that we are being tempted to worry about, to not pray and intercede for us, to take John Davenport's situation. He could have just gone through his surgeries and said, good doctors, private health insurance, surely. And the temptation could have been to not say anything about it, turn up three weeks later and you know, here I'm back again. But there's a vulnerability saying, I'm not Superman.

This has happened. This is real. It's kind of scary. Pray for me. Carry this burden with me.

Self-sufficiency causes us not to be vulnerable. Those are three things at least that can be very, very dangerous in our lives. We go to God less, we worship God less, and we are not vulnerable. And so we train ourselves to believe that we need to work harder, that we need to plan smarter, to train better. Why?

Because we convince ourselves we have the power to control a better outcome, to avert a disaster, to negotiate negative consequences. And so we strive and we strive and then even when we can't physically do anything about it, we lie in bed awake at night worrying. We know that we really can't do anything, but let me just play this idea in my mind again and again and again and somehow that's going to solve it. But that is a deception that the enemy, the number one enemy of God, uses. Satan, to isolate us from God. Even Christians who belong to God can live a life as if they do not belong to Him.

As if they are not children that can go to Him. It's our absolute detriment to be self-reliant. Think about our drought for a moment. How long have we been talking about how dry it's been? How long have we been saying our farmers are struggling?

How many Facebook petitions have we passed around saying divert some of this funding to these areas. Why are we putting aid to these countries when our farmers need the help and so on and so on. We've talked about dams, we've talked about cash handouts for the farmers. What do we need? We need rain.

We need rain. We've somehow forgotten that that is actually the thing we really need. It's interesting, the people that I see during the week, small groups that I visit, people that I pray with during the week, consistently amongst groups of various ages, demographics, people are praying about this. We're saying we've got to pray for the drought. We have to pray for the farmers.

There's something in all of us now that's saying, we're kind of helpless here. We're kind of not very powerful here. We're sort of instinctively looking up. And I mean, how many times when a disaster does happen, you find the most surprising people saying, we've got to pray. Politicians come out of the woodwork saying, we've got to pray to the good Lord.

Barnaby Joyce. Barn and rejoice. Pray to the good Lord. We go from government leaders, politicians. We go to the Egypts of our time, the powerful and the influential, and we try to secure our positions.

We seek to shore up our lifestyles. We seek to solve our problems, suppress our anxieties. And we do that through all sorts of chemical solutions. All the while, we move from one knee-jerk reaction to the other. We hop from one bad relationship to the other.

One bad choice to the next. And we fail to go to the one, the only one who can really do anything about that situation. The Egyptians are but men. They were the greatest superpower of the time. The Syrians were on their way up, but before them it was Egypt.

But they are just men. Their horses are just flesh. Their strength is limited. They're finite beings. God is eternal.

God is almighty. This is the truth that our worried hearts need to be reminded of. God is limitless. Our man-made solutions are nothing when compared to His infinite insight and power. You think by worrying you can sort out the mess. God sees eight billion possibilities in your situation.

Things that you don't even have an idea about that can be a solution. He knows. Woe to those. Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in their chariots because they are many. Don't fall into the trap of self-sufficiency.

God warns here. Woe befalls those who do. So what is the answer then? If we need to avoid relying on ourselves, on our planning and our scheming, what can we rely on? Who do we trust? Well, we need to rely on God.

And we need to rely on Him far more than we do. So we turn to the peace of knowing and going to God. Jesus once said in His teaching ministry, do not fear those who are able to kill the body. Fear the one who is able to destroy both body and soul. Matthew 10:28.

The God who created us didn't just create our bodies. He created our metaphysical existence as well. Our souls. He's created that in us, but He's created that in the world, in existence itself. Since this God is the one who has the power to create it, He's also got the power to destroy it, to snuff it out, to stop that existence. But here is the good news.

This God who has the power to destroy both body and soul also now has the power to save body and soul. The Egyptians are but men. The horses are but flesh, but God is God and His power is anything more than simply physical. In our passage, verses four to five, it goes on to speak of God who can shield the capital city of Jerusalem like a bird hovering over it. Did you read that? A bird hovering over it.

Now the image here that we get is like of maybe some eagle that sort of does the loops around its nest. You've probably seen that. Or in our context, magpies in spring season. Right?

Swooping everyone. Hovering, making sure that babies are protected, eggs are protected. This is how God will protect Jerusalem, the capital of His people, the nation of Israel. He will shield her.

He will deliver her from her enemies. If Israel would only return to God, He will rescue them from the Assyrian kingdom. Verse four gives us this picture of a lion, a lion who's just chomped down into a juicy little bit of mutton, a little sheep.

And as you've probably seen those National Geographic stories, David Attenborough, the lion is just hunched over his prey. And you've probably also seen, like, vultures come and steal it, and he just chases them off. In this situation, it's the shepherds trying to save, I don't know what they're trying to save. Maybe they can eat the little sheep now.

But they're coming and they're, you know, beating pots and pans. They're trying to scare the lion off, and the image here is of the lion just laughing at them. What can they do? He's not moved. He's not fussed by their noise.

They clamour. These are beautifully vivid images of the profound protective love of God for His people. This is what God promises to all those who will simply come to Him in their need. I want to ask you the question: are you willing to trust that this God can be that protective over you? Will you receive the peace of knowing God as the powerful lion of your life?

Can He be the Mufasa of your heart? Or will you turn back to your own worrying, your own planning, your own powerlessness, trying to solve your problems by working hard and numbing your anxiety through cheap substitutes? Tell your heart today that there is a God who can deal with it all. All of it. All of you.

The God of the Bible is not like a man. He is spirit and not flesh. He is infinite, not bound by our laws and our conventions. He can heal with a word, a word of His mouth.

In Jesus' case, He simply had to think and a little girl was healed. But how do we know this is true for me? You might say, KJ, this might be true for Israel, a special people of a special time and place that God worked through and with very specifically, but how can this be true for me? How can I trust that this is for me? Well, this leads to the last and the wonderful promise which we also see in this passage:

The guarantee of God's love for all mankind. After Isaiah 31, hundreds of years pass. Israel do not turn back to God. Or at least in part they do, but it's not very long-standing and they are eventually consumed by Assyria. And then a few generations later, it's the Babylonian Empire.

Seven hundred years pass and a man by the name of Jesus turns up on the scene. By this stage it's the Roman Empire. They've just consumed Israel. But this man is special and He says some amazing things. And at one point, in fact a week out from His death, a horrifying, humiliating crucifixion on the cross, Jesus, having told His disciples, His followers that He will die for sin, He will die for the sins of people like you and me. In His final week.

Though no one knew that it was His final week, Jesus sat in Jerusalem. He sat actually overlooking Jerusalem and He said this in Matthew 23:37: Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who have been sent to you. How often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wing. But you are not willing.

The Son of God sees Jerusalem, the great capital, the centre of the Jewish faith. He sees them and He pities them. Why? Because they have gone back to the Isaiah 31 self-reliance. And Jesus knows that His enemies are about to manipulate the system to make it work for them, to try and solve the problem of this Jesus who is really, really annoying and disrupting a whole bunch of stuff.

These enemies controlling faith in God in a way that enriched them, that made them gods amongst the people. And Jesus sees it and He sighs and He says, I wish I can protect you like a bird hovering over her chicks. But He knows too well what will be involved in Jerusalem's disgraceful miscalculation. They get it wrong again. They murder the great prophet, the greatest prophet that has been sent to them.

But in addition to this bird image that Jesus calls upon—hovering over the nest—Isaiah 31 goes on and says that God will protect and deliver Jerusalem. That's what it says in verse five. The word in verse five that our ESV translation writes is "to spare it". The NIV, if you have the NIV, says in quotation marks "to pass over". Now this is significant because that word "to pass over" in the Hebrew is the word Pesach, which is the Passover.

Which is, remember in the story, the tradition of Israel where the angel of God passed over the people of God to finally crush and to resolve and free them from Egypt, the great slave masters. Who is God talking about here in Isaiah 31? Egypt. And you can almost sense the incredulous surprise by God. How can you go back to them?

I will pass over you. I will spare you. I will deliver you from judgment. But the night before Jesus goes to the cross is also the Passover. On that holiday, Jesus takes a cup of wine and says to His followers, His closest disciples, this is the sign of a new promise, a new covenant.

Tomorrow my body will be broken, my blood will be shed for you. And as the Passover lamb had to be slaughtered in Egypt, its sacrifice signified by its blood covering the Israelites from the passing of God's judgment on Egypt, so Christ's blood is to be spilt to protect all of mankind from judgment. Isaiah 31 and it's all here. There's a new Passover coming.

And it points forward to a complete rescue because history tells us Israel falls, Jerusalem falls. God promises salvation to His people. There's a reason C. S. Lewis, when he wrote The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, many of us probably read that as kids, allegorised Jesus and it was based on the Christian message. Allegorised Jesus as Aslan the Lion.

Because the Bible itself calls Jesus the Lion of Judah, Revelation 5:5. But even here in Isaiah 31, we catch a glimpse of Jesus. As a lion growls and protects his prey, and even when a band of shepherds is called out against him, he is not terrified by their shouting, he is not daunted by their noise. And so the Lord will come down and fight on Mount Zion and on its hill. Which hill was that?

No amount of noise, no amount of threats that the enemy can make will divert the warpath of Jesus Christ, the King. He will fight for His people on Zion. What is Zion? It is Jerusalem. Where does the crucifixion take place?

In Jerusalem. The lion has come to do battle on his hill. And so this same C. S. Lewis who writes about Aslan the Lion also said this at one point: fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs a bit of improvement.

Fallen man is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Our self-sufficiency that manifests itself in worrying comes out as rebellion against the God who knows us, who knows our needs, who knows our weaknesses and yet we are that resistant. We are that stubborn that accepting His control of our life is less like a person needing to just improve things a bit, have a little bit of self-respect or self-esteem.

It's less that. It's like a rebel laying down their weapons fighting against the King. The reason we can trust God with our lives, the reason we can hand over all our worries and burdens to Him is summed up in Jesus on the cross. He is the Lion of Judah who battled for us. He is the mother hen who seeks cover for His children.

His victory over sin means there is actually nothing to really worry about. That is a big statement. Think about whether that is true or not. Because the greatest threat has been overcome for us who believe: eternity away from the unrivalled presence of God.

If you are a Christian and you know Jesus, this will put steel in our spine in every situation. It gives us unconquerable hope. We cannot return to the god of self-sufficiency, the god of worry, because if God could rescue us and did rescue us from such a terrifying threat—the threat of eternal destitution—can He also not care about us in the little things? Will He also not put food on our table if He loves us that much? Will He also not give us the strength to deal with the stress of work?

Will He also not provide us a suitable spouse? Will He also not give us a reason to find joy in even the most painful situations? Can the God who is spirit, not merely flesh, can He not fill our hearts with peace and rest? As a lion growls and the whole band of shepherds is called against him, he is not frightened by their shouts, so the Lord will come to do battle on Mount Zion. He will hover over us and He will shield us.

He will pass over us and rescue us. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for these precious words. We thank you that there is so much peace to be found in You. You are the source of life.

You're the source of hope. You're the source of meaning and purpose. And yet, well, there is some rebellion in our hearts that just will not accept this. There's a rebellion in our hearts that proves to us that we are not simply people in need of a little bit of tuning up, a little bit of self-care. We are rebels trying to, in our own strength, in our own way, by our own rules, give purpose and meaning, provide solutions and restoration for the brokenness of this world and our existence.

Free us from the deception that there is anything in us, this world that is perfect, that we can attain, that will solve all things. There is nothing. Everything is a chasing after the wind. With You, there is life. With You, there is purpose and meaning.

Father, we so easily forget. Help us not to forget. Help us this morning to tie this around our hearts, to cement it into our minds, Lord, that You are the great lion who has fought on our behalf. You're the one that we can go to, even as we attempted to go and make plans for ourselves. Help all of us here this morning to sense Your power, to sense not simply Your power but Your nearness as well.

That You are spirit and that You are as close to us as our skin and our breath. And help us to also believe that You could love us, us, in our imperfection, in our rebellion. Lord, we do receive this. For those that may be doing this for the first time this morning,

I pray, Lord, a special blessing over them that they may know beyond a shadow of a doubt this morning that if they will simply reach out to receive the gift of Jesus Christ, what He has won for us on the cross—complete forgiveness, complete reconciliation with God—that if they would simply reach out for that, confess their need of it, turn away from their life of self-reliance, that You will receive them, that they are as good as adopted into Your family. I pray this for all of us and I pray that specifically for them as well. In Jesus' name, amen.