Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:6, 7).

Prayer is the spiritual counter-measure to fretful - churning hearts. We can worry or pray. What God is telling us here is that worry and anxiety are the result of prayerlessness. Anxiety is a spiritual issue.

We must pray. The word prayer here is the Greek word proseuche. The prefix pros, has the idea of “face-to-face.” This prefix heightens the intensity and intimacy of prayer. We fervently pray to God in a face-to-face encounter of bringing to him all that burdens us and distracts us.

Francois Fenelon, a seventeenth-century French Roman Catholic writer put it this way:

Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one’s heart, its pleasures and its pains, to a dear friend. Tell Him your troubles, that He may comfort you; tell Him your joys, that He may sober them; tell Him your longings, that he may purify them; tell Him your dislikes, that He may help you to conquer them; talk to Him of your temptations, that He may shield you from them; show Him the wounds of your heart, that He may heal them; lay bare your indifference to good, your depraved tastes for evil, your instability. Tell Him how self-love makes you unjust to others, how vanity tempts you to be insincere, how pride disguises you to yourself and to others.

If you thus pour out all your weaknesses, needs, troubles, there will be no lack of what to say. You will never exhaust the subject. It is continually being renewed. People who have no secrets from each other never want for subjects of conversation. They do not weigh their words, for there is nothing to be held back; neither do they seek for something to say. They talk out of the abundance of the heart, without consideration they say just what they think. Blessed are they who attain to such familiar, unreserved intercourse with God.


"The real problem of the Christian life,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day."

We must pray. We must pray about everything. There is nothing too great for God’s power; and nothing too small for his fatherly care. Paul commands us to stop bowing down to worry, running to answer its every beckon call. Pray, don’t worry. Pray! Don’t churn and fret and wring your hands. Pray. Take every thought captive to obedience in Christ Jesus.