Unless the Lord builds the house…
From recent statistics, it has been found that in England, 20.2% of adults had a common mental health condition in 2023/24, with anxiety being a prevalent type, while a 2023 UK survey by the Mental Health Foundation found that 73% of adults had felt anxious at least sometimes in the preceding two weeks. This is a rising trend in our world, and what is the plan of God for His children, especially when it comes to our mental health?
Text for Reflection: Psalms 127:1-2 AMP
[1] Unless the Lord builds the house, They labor in vain who build it; Unless the Lord guards the city, The watchman keeps awake in vain. [2] It is vain for you to rise early, To retire late, To eat the bread of anxious labors— For He gives [blessings] to His beloved even in his sleep.
There are so many of us labouring in many aspects of life, and labouring to do things our way. Why don’t we look at what the Psalmist is saying to us? Especially with building our lives around God’s purpose and plan that He has designed even before we were formed in our mother’s womb. God told Nehemiah that’s even before he was formed in his mother’s womb, he knew him and He made him a prophet to the nations. (Nehemiah 1:5). That covers the scope of why Nehemiah came to the world, so it was easy for him to navigate his daily routine. And whenever he found himself going outside the confines of God’s purpose for him, he was able to control himself, getting back on track.
Why we do too much and get so little is because we are anxious over what we need to leave for God. If it is God’s purpose for us, He himself will build it, just like David wrote in the Psalms 127:1-2, he said, unless the Lord builds the house, they labour in vain…those who build. The Builder is God! Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchmen keep awake in vain; which means we can only trust God for the security of our today and our tomorrow. Our days, our years, and our future are in the hands of the Lord. We only need to trust Him. The Apostle Paul writes to the Philippian church: “6 Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; 7 and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:6-7). When we hand over everything to God, then we see His hand in everything because the results will prove that He is the one doing it.
So what is a root of anxiety? The root of anxiety is when we pile up so much on our minds, overly busy about building; we think about security, finances, raising our children and thinking about how to sustain our marriage. We also think about how we sustain the business and ministry, and we alone want to try to hold everything together. But we are forgetting something here! Building and sustaining all of these are meant to be done by God if we trust and allow Him. We only need to have faith in the Father, and by faith, we see Him shift his hands to build and keep all the above together. Anxiety is never an answer but an instrument in the hand of the devil to stop us, because when we are anxious, we are tired and fatigued, and the end goal of the enemy for us is depression.
So what do we do? The next thing is for us to go to bed, for He gives blessings to his beloved even in his sleep. “It is vain for you to rise early, To retire late, To eat the bread of anxious labours— For He gives [blessings] to His beloved even in his sleep” (Psalms 127:2). When we hand over all of these to God, He will build and sustain all our plans, as far as our purposes are kingdom-focused. Then the “sleep” that the Psalmist mentioned is a symbol of rest, peace and joy that we get only when we see the hand of God build, if only we can trust Him enough.
