A cure for care
A Cure for Care
Spurgeon treats excessive worry as a form of distrust rather than a mood, and prescribes something to do about it instead of asking you to feel differently.
“Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.”
This passage also appears in bible verses about anxiety.
- Passage
- 1 Peter 5:7
- Preached
- 12 January 1862
- Place
- Metropolitan Tabernacle, London
- Reference
- Sermon 428
Spurgeon preached this on a January Sunday in 1862, to a congregation of London tradesmen and workers whose money worries were keeping them awake for real reasons. It is not an abstract sermon about faith: it deals with failing businesses, with children, with bread.
What makes it unusual is that he does not build it around comfort. He builds it around a diagnosis. He calls worry a disease and treats it like one: describe it first, prescribe second, and only at the end give the reasons the cure works.
First: the disease
Spurgeon splits worry in two. One kind he calls illegitimate: ambition, greed, imagined anxieties about things that have not happened. He argues it would dissolve on its own if a person humbled himself under God's hand, because it grows out of pride.
The other kind is legitimate: tomorrow's bread, the children, the work. With that one he is far more careful. He does not say it is wrong to feel it. He says that past a certain point it stops being foresight and turns into distrust that anyone is handling it.
His examples are uncomfortably concrete: the tradesman whose anxiety nudges him step by step toward fraud, and the businessman losing sleep over a deal. Neither of them set out to do anything wrong.
Second: the cure
The verb in the text is cast, and Spurgeon presses that it is a verb of effort, not of resignation. Casting a load is something you do: you lift it and you put it down somewhere else. So the cure has two halves. Prayer, which sets out the problem, and faith, which stops standing guard over the solution.
He works through what actually worried his congregation: daily bread, quoting Jesus on the lilies; business anxiety; children; and spiritual anxieties, which he takes as seriously as the material ones.
Third: why it works
Here Spurgeon does not argue from psychology but from character: God's providence over everything and over each thing, his particular affection for his own, and promises made to named people.
The close is the second half of the verse, which is where the whole weight sits: “for he careth for you”. The argument is not that worrying is useless. It is that someone is already on it.
In his own words
“Leave your cares with God and care for Him.”
“Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God.”
This is our summary. The full sermon by Charles Spurgeon is available at Christian Classics Ethereal Library. It is in the public domain: you can read all of it for free.
Start Building Your Habit Today
Choose your platform
