“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”
1 Peter 5:7
I’ve been thinking a lot about this verse lately. I also love the song “Cast My Cares” by Finding Favour and hear it frequently on the radio. I was thinking about the word cast and what it means. I remembered how it’s a fishing term and how the disciples, many of them being fishermen, would understand what Peter meant when he used it.
Merriam-Webster defines cast as:
•To throw or move (something) in a forceful way
•To throw (a fishing line, hook, etc.) into the water by using a fishing pole
•To send or direct (something) in the direction of something
In this verse, Peter encourages us to intentional action. Casting our anxiety on God means that we throw it out to Him, thereby pushing it away from ourselves. It requires a release on our part. It’s like putting our cares in a big box and shipping them to God via FedEx.
Casting our worries out to God is proof that we believe He is in control of our lives and our problems. I think that sometimes we like to hold on to our problems because it’s scary to let them go without knowing how things will turn out. When the problems are still within our grasp, it seems like we still have some control over them and the outcome. But truly, the problems control us by giving us anxiety. So we need to let them go and trust God as we wait for their resolution.
This is so much easier said than done! For many years I operated out of the mindset that if I wasn’t worrying, then something must not be important to me. But now I know that the opposite is true: if something is important to me, I need to cast it out to God because He is able to handle the important problems in my life. Often, I am not in control or can’t affect many of the things that worry me. But He can!
Back to fishing: when fishermen cast out their nets or rods, they hope to receive something in return, fish. I believe that we too can hope to receive from God when we cast our anxieties out Him:
“Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken.”
Psalm 55:22
What anxieties do you need to cast upon the Lord today?
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