- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
DO NOT FRET.
By Mrs Jessie Penn-Lewis.
“Do not fret because of evil men” . . . “Do not fret” . . . “Do not fret - it leads only to evil” (Psalm 37 v1, 7, 8).
Three times the Psalmist repeats the warning. The Saxon of the word “fret” is ‘“fretan’’, to “gnaw”, or “eat up”. How expressive it is. How this fretting eats away our spiritual rest. The fretting over the wrong doing of others, fretting when “men succeed in their ways, and when they carry out their wicked schemes” (v7), fretting until it ends in sin and evildoing in ourselves.
Someone says, ‘I can rest and trust God in all that He sends to me, but it is doubt as to my part being right that causes me to fret’. ‘Were my motives pure ?’ ’Did I obey God ?’ ‘Am I hindering God ?’ All this is often the underlying restlessness visible in otherwise devoted Christian lives.
What is the cure for worry ? Only the Spirit taught knowledge of Galatians 2 v20 “I have been crucified with Christ”. There is no other source of healing but the death of Christ at Calvary. No other way of deliverance, “By his wounds we are healed”.
This subtle ‘I’, that we doubt and fear, was crucified with Him. If we truly believed it we should understand what is meant by, “for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from His” (Heb. 4 v10). The rest of ceasing from myself to find my all in Him.
But how do we experience this? Only when we understand and accept that in Christ we have died, and hand over our whole being to the control of Another. He then undertakes the management and the responsibility, not so much by working upon us from outside, but by taking the control within, and Himself becoming the indwelling life and power. We are to accept that we have died, and now rest, moment by moment, upon His faithfulness in working out His will through the utter weakness of the earthen vessel. “Work out . . . for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to His good purpose” (Phil. 2 v12-13). Trusting hour by hour in childlike faith that God is working in us to do His will, there comes a calm, unquestioning, restful assurance, which puts oil on the wheels of daily life.
But supposing we have accepted the deliverance of Calvary, and in simple faith on the Word of God accounted ourselves as crucified with Christ, what are we actually to do in the hour of temptation? When the old worry and fever and fuss seem to attack us, when we are conscious of the pressure of the adversary seeking to drive us into the old restlessness and fret, what must we do?
It is then that inwardly we need, so to speak, to take God’s side against ourselves. To remind the Lord that we have been crucified with Him, and that He is now the Living One within us, remind Him that He has undertaken the responsibility, and that now is the time for Him to prove His own word and keep us, the fragile believer, under His calm control.
But there is a very important condition that we must not forget, and we shall find it in Isaiah 26 v3, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind (imagination) is steadfast, because he trusts in You”. Much of the worry and fret that troubles us comes from our imagination. We imagine a thousand things that never happen. If we are to know God’s perfect peace in actual reality, we must not only accept the crucifixion of the worrying ‘I’, and count upon the indwelling of the risen Lord, but definitely commit to Him the mind or imagination, that He may keep it stayed upon Himself. We must refuse to look back or forward and trust the indwelling Christ to hold our restless imagination within His power, and He will prove that He is able to keep us in perfect peace as we rely on Him.
May the Eternal Spirit make real to us day by day the power of the Cross of Jesus and the new life in union with the risen Lord. A life in which Jesus Himself undertakes to be in us and work through us all that He desires from us as we rest upon Him. Let us say with Paul, “I labour, struggling with all His energy, which so powerfully works in me” (Col. 1 v29).