Heart Cries: Anxiety – Whom (or What) Shall You Fear?
Psalm 27
I’m a bit anxious about today’s sermon. Yes, anxious about talking to you about being anxious.
I think I feel this way because so many people, including church people, struggle with anxiety. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), anxiety is the most commonly reported mental and emotional disorder that people confess to struggling with in the U.S. Over 40 million adults in the United States age 18 and older, or 18% of the population, report that they are negatively affected by anxiety.
So, what do I mean by anxiety? Here’s a simple definition: Anxiety is a feeling of apprehension or fear about what might happen. So, make note: It’s not always bad to feel anxious. In fact, one of the good things about us as human beings is that God has made us to be able to feel anxious when there is something real to be anxious about.
For example: Imagine that you're alone at night walking down a street. You turn a corner and notice that it’s darker than usual. Suddenly, you hear footsteps behind you –getting closer by the second. Your heart begins to pound, your mind races about what to do. In this kind of case, anxiety may lead you to do something that protects your life, e.g., pull out your mace, make a quick phone call, etc. Of course, the person running up behind you may be out for a late night jog. But your reaction to the anxiety could save you from harm.
Or, think about a final exam or important project at work. Anxiety often has the affect of motivating you to work in a more focused way on the project or to study for the exam. If you never felt anxious about doing well on your tests or having your project done in time the boss, you may not go very far in school or work.
However, when anxious feelings, like worry and fear, begin to be debilitating -- keeping you from normal activities, when they become excessive, or have no apparent association with things that actually happen -- they can be evidence of an anxiety disorder. And that's a whole other story.
Debilitating Anxiety
There are a number of ways that anxiety can become destructive in your life. Here are just a few:
- General Anxiety Disorder
- Panic Disorder -- a type of anxiety characterized by brief or sudden attacks of intense terror that often leads to shaking, confusion, dizziness, nausea, and difficulty breathing.
- Social Anxiety Disorder – That’s when you fear being negatively judged by others or fear public embarrassment. This disorder can cause you to avoid human contact to the point that normal life becomes very hard. If you struggle with that, know that I am thankful you have made it to church!
I believe King David struggled with some kind of anxiety disorder. The language he uses in his Psalms points me to that again and again. And he surely had good reasons for his anxiety. For years of his life, he was chased by a crazy king and the king’s army. Later, he constantly felt the pressures of leading a new and fragile nation. And he had serious marriage and family problems. In fact, two of his sons betrayed him and tried to put him out of office. So, I find that David’s Psalms are especially relevant to this topic of anxiety.
The topic of anxiety is too big to be dealt with in one sermon. So, I’ve prayerfully considered what I should focus on in the moments I have. Here’s what I’ll do today: I want you to see the main difference that David’s faith in God made in his anxiety-filled world. I want you to find the same kind of confidence and peace in the midst of anxiety that he did. It all had to do with his relationship to God.
But, before I do that, I want some of you to know that I believe that God has built into his world some general truth and help available even to people who do not know him or even seek him.
Anxiety, Faith, Meds and Therapy
When I speak about topics like this, I find that some people are tempted to think that, if I just trust Jesus more, then I’ll never have any anxiety. And they throw away any other kind of help that God has made available in this world that he has created. So, listen carefully now: God heals in many ways – both in ways we call natural and super-natural. God made the natural and God is the God of the supernatural.
Here’s a principle: We who follow Jesus believe that all truth is God’s truth, including whatever is true about our human emotional functioning. And there is nothing in all the universe that has not been created by God, including whatever is found in medication.
How might God provide help in more natural ways for people dealing with anxiety? Over the years, I have found that there are two main ways that health care professionals seek to provide help for people suffering from anxiety: medication and therapy. Medication can be misapplied and abused. I know that. And the therapy can be foolish and misguided. I know that too. But, please know that Christian and non-Christian alike can benefit greatly both from wisely prescribed meds and from good counsel.
Sometimes, anxiety disorders have a deeply physiological component to them. Something in the body gets out of sync. A properly diagnosed problem can often be helped significantly by medication. But, be sure of this: Meds cannot solve the problems that make you anxious but they can help alleviate the out-of-control feelings that anxiety causes so that you might begin to deal with those problems more reasonably.
In addition to finding some help from meds, some of you have shared with me that you simply discovered some good therapy and counsel that has helped you cope with stress.
So, just before I turn to the way the Bible speaks to the heart of our anxiety, I want to say clearly that some of God’s help can come in more “natural” ways to us to us, whether we are Christians or not Christians. If you are struggling with anxiety, it may be that good meds may help ease some of the volatility of it and good advice from professional counsellors may help you manage it. If they’re helping you, don’t throw either one out.
If you need some help finding a good Christ-centered counsellor or a small group to walk with you, I’ll show you right now where you might find the next step: Find some resources at www.lakeave.org/counseling. And we have a counseling intake number to help you too: 626.844.4794.
I’ve been reading a lot of secular articles about anxiety this week. The single most common advice I have found about anxiety is this: “The things you’re worried about may never happen. Learn not to worry about things that may never happen. Instead, visualize a future without bad things happening. Visualize that future. Focus on that. Don’t focus on all the things that could go wrong.”
And, at last, that piece of advice brings me to the distinctive way the Bible talks about handling anxiety.
The Foundation for Lasting Help: Dwelling Face-to-Face with the Lord
In Psalm 27, David writes a song about how anxiety and faith live side-by-side in his life. Some scholars have said that it really is two different Psalms that somehow got jammed into one. They think that anxiety and faith cannot coexist like this in a person’s life. But, the scholars are wrong about that. David takes what most of us experience and puts it into a profound Psalm. He tells us that people of faith sometimes are anxious.
Psalm 27 is about a man who genuinely believes in God but is going through a time filled with fear, worry, and anxiety. Notice where he begins and ends the Psalm: With remembering what God is like: Vv.1, 13. So, this Psalm is a personal experience of a man who wrestled with deep fears but continued to honor God.
The Realism of a Person of Faith
When we look at Psalm 27, we see a very refreshing transparency about how hard things might be in our world. David did not do what many counselors suggest we should do when we are anxious, i.e., to try to visualize a life in which there is no trouble. He didn’t try to say, “Those things I am anxious about could never happen.” He knew they could – and you do too.
For example, look at v.3. David says, “Though an army besiege me.” Many think David wrote this when Saul with his army was trying to catch David. What David imagines in the situation is the worst that could happen! “What if the army is all around me, with weapons, and ready to attack.” Then, in v.10, he envisions something even worse, “What if even my parents turn against me?”
You see, there is no indication that an entire army actually was besieging David at the time. And there is no evidence that David’s mother and father actually forsook him. But, David knew those things could happen in this world. He says, “Even if those things do happen …”
What is David doing? He is doing the opposite of what many articles say about handling our fears. He is actually imagining the worst things that could happen to him in his world. Why? Because he wants to have a strategy of life, a strategy of dealing with fears and anxieties, that can stand up to anything – that fears nothing that might happen in this world.
And that’s what he found in his relationship to God. The Bible does not tell us to try to envision a day in our lives without trouble. It tells us to envision the worst that this world could throw at us and consciously remember that the God who is with us is greater than anything that might make us anxious in this world. So, David writes a song in which he begins by saying that God is the stronghold of his life, a place of safety, so that he does not have to be afraid of anyone or anything. Nothing can separate him from the love of God.
And David ends the Psalm by saying in vv. 13-14 that we can be confident in this world in which we tend to be afraid and we can be strong and have hearts of peace as we wait on the Lord in the midst of trouble.
So, the distinctive key to dealing with anxiety is applying your faith in God to the situation that causes anxiety. It’s not that you should try to pretend that troubling things won’t happen. You know they do. No, you call out the things that you might be afraid of – and you learn to face them with God. That’s what David says.
How Do You Take Steps to Move from Fear to Trust?
I believe that v. 4 provides the practical key to you applying your faith in a God who is your light and stronghold to your situation of anxiety:
One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
1) to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and 2) to seek him in his temple.
There are three verbs in this prayer: dwell, gaze and seek.
Word 1: Dwell
The greatest desire David has in the midst of anxiety is to dwell in God’s house. This means to be consciously in the presence of God, i.e., to live in a way in which he is deeply aware of God’s presence so that he can rest in that. He’s talking about what I feel when I’ve been travelling and involved in a difficult task and then go home. I think, “This is wonderful -- to be in my bed, with my family, and eating food I really like.” What David is saying is that his “one thing”, his greatest desire, is to experience the unbroken presence of God in the midst of his anxiety-producing situation.
Note this: Anxiety is often caused when something else in this world has become your “one thing”, things like your money, your health, your reputation… When that is the case, and that “one thing” is threatened, you become afraid. The Bible is saying that, in times of anxiety, the main thing you must learn to seek is to be in God’s presence. David is saying here, “My fears are directly proportional to the vulnerability of the things that are my greatest desires. If the one thing I ask for is God’s presence, then I will always be able to live without fear. Nothing in this world. can take that away. And God is greater than anything I might fear in this world.
Word 2: Gaze
When you take time to acknowledge that God is with you, then, take time also to “gaze on his beauty.” When you gaze on the beauty of something, you turn the thing you want over in your imagination. It may be a career. It may be a house at the beach. It may be getting out of debt. It may be a particular person… You gaze on it -- you imagine what life would be like if you got it. David says that “gazing” like this this is the way things become the “one thing” of our lives. What he does is he calls himself – and you too – to take time to gaze on the beauty of God. Do you ever take time to do that? David says unless you do that, other things will become your idols and you’ll have a fearful life – a life afraid of those things not happening.
You can always follow your worries to the things that enslave you. When other things in this world become the “one thing” you want, you think you have to have those things in order to be happy. Then, you “gaze on them”. You adore them, and you become anxious that you’ll lose them. So when other things become “one things,” that’s when anxiety comes.
If God is your ‘one thing,’ the one thing I ask for most – so much that you gaze on his beauty, then you can be anxiety-free” Anything but God is vulnerable. But, nothing can take God away from you.
Word 3: Seek
The word seek means to go and get counsel. So what the Bible is telling you to do in the midst of anxiety is to pray like this, “Lord, I gaze upon you and see how good and beautiful and powerful you are. So, when I come to you, I am telling you that I know I need to find out what your will is. Oh Lord, I want to find out your will, and submit to it.” Do you seek God that way?
There are disciplines to seeking his will. You read the Bible. You pray. You meditate. You worship with your brothers and sisters in Christ at church. Those are the inner disciplines. Then you have the outer disciplines. Be careful stewards in your financial lifestyle instead of materialistic. Be sexually pure instead of impure. Be forgiving instead of bitter. Have a servant’s heart instead of a self-centered and arrogant heart.
Gazing and seeking describe the two essential parts of walking with God. But we often separate them. If you only seek God’s will to obey him day in and day out without gazing on the beauty, your walk with God will be legalistic and burdensome. You won’t grow in your love of God and you’ll get worn out. But, on the other hand, if you just try to gaze on his beauty, just have great religious experiences, but you don’t seek to find out God’s will and do daily obedience, you will find you will walk away from God.
In times of anxiety, seek first to know God’s presence. Then take time to gaze on his greatness, his power over all things, and his love for you. Then seek to live in the situation in ways that honor him. You then will, as vv. 13-14 say, “be confident, strong and able to wait upon the Lord.”
Bottom line: we live in an anxious world. But we don’t need studies and statistics to tell us that, do we? We see the reality of it everyday. We live in a world where most people don’t have enough of anything, and too many people have too much of everything. We live in a world that is anxious about global warming and natural disasters and wrong people being elected. We live in a world that brings so much pain and injustice to so many. We live in a world that is worried about running out, about not having enough, about not doing enough, and about not measuring up. I want you to come and dwell with God, gaze on him, and seek his ways again.
I can imagine there are a number of you here today who are saying, “Okay, Pastor Greg, this is very interesting -- but I’m anxious right now about something that’s going to happen on Thursday. That’s four days away. What do I do until then? Today, you have come into his house and are among his people. I want you right now to gaze on the beauty of Jesus. Gaze on him. Look at him. Look at what he is doing. Look at him dying for you. Gaze on him defeating death by his resurrection. He is greater than your fears. How much more of the beauty of God can we see because we know Jesus?
Tell him, “You’re my ‘one thing.’ I see your beauty. I will trust you so that I’m afraid of nothing anymore. Do you understand that? Unless you’re able to get this into your blood you’re going to live a fearful life. Don’t you see? “If my father and mother forsake me, if my spouse forsakes me, if my career forsakes me, if romance forsakes me, if my looks forsake me, the Lord will never forsake me.”
Let’s take time to respond to this. Before our service ends, I want to give you the chance to gaze on the Lord and seek the Lord. Is there anything you are anxious about now? We’ll give you just a moment right now – with us in this place – to give that matter to God.
And the language in this Psalm of David meeting God “in his house” and seeking “in his Temple” leads me to see that we need to give you a chance to have someone pray with you about any matter that is a burden on you now. So, we will give you a chance now to come for prayer…