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The Bible and Anxiety

Heath Lambert: Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go online and answer questions from several hundred, people who are doing online training for ACBC. Some of those questions were about how to use the Bible to handle anxiety. And I wanted you to hear that interaction. Here’s what I said:

When working with a person who has anxiety problems and panic attacks, what is a good way to encourage and direct them? For example, someone who tries quoting Scripture and praying but claims that doesn’t work and that they have a mental illness. Okay, that is a good question and there are a number of parts to it.

So the part is, you’ve got somebody who has anxiety problems and panic attacks, and what is a good way to encourage and direct them? I want to say first of all that the Bible is all about our fears and anxieties. In fact—I would say it even stronger than that—I would say that if the Bible is not about our fears and our anxieties, then I honestly do not know what the Bible is about. Here’s just one evidence of that. The most common commonly repeated command in the Bible is to fear not. So God—I take it just in terms of sheer accounting of commands—God is very concerned with whether or not we are afraid. And so we need to be encouraged that the Bible is a place where we find abundant, overflowing resources to help with anxiety. If we don’t have what the Bible says about anxiety, we actually won’t know very much about it. We need God’s Word to tell us about the spiritual problem of anxiety. And so, when I say that, when I say that the Bible is so full to bursting with teaching on anxiety, then what that means is there are all kinds of places that we could go. We go to the Psalms, we could go to Genesis, we could go to Revelation, and we go to all sorts of places for encouragement in our anxiety and worry. One common place that might be helpful and instructive for our time is Jesus’ teaching on fear, for example, in The Sermon on the Mount. This is what Jesus says in Matthew 6, starting in verse 25, “For this reason, I say to you, do not be worried about your life as to what you will eat or what you will drink nor for your body as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more than they? And who of you, by being worried, can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow, they do not toil, nor do they spin. Yet I say to you that not even Solomon, in all his glory, clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes, the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow, is thrown into the furnace. Will he not much more clothe you, oh you of little faith? Do not worry then, saying, ‘what will we eat? Or what will we drink? Or what will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, for your heavenly Father knows what you need. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Now, that is nine verses, and it is three months of counseling for an anxious person. There are a couple of things here. First of all, Jesus places fear at odds with faith. “Why do you worry? Oh, you of little faith.” Fear is the absence of faith. You understand how that could be true when you understand how Jesus tells us to combat worry. He says three times here, don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry. And in the context of that instruction not to worry He preaches a sermon about two things. He preaches a sermon about the sovereignty of God over everything, He is in charge of the birds, and He is in charge of the flowers in the field. He is in control. But it’s not just sovereignty. The second thing in the sermon that He preaches is that He cares. Don’t you think you’re more than a bird? Don’t you think you’re more than the grass in the field? God is combating our worry here by Jesus teaching a sermon about the sovereign care of God. He means to deflate and destroy worry by magnifying the power of God and by showing that in God’s kingdom, all of that power is directed toward you. That takes faith. And so, if you don’t see the power of God, if you don’t see the care of God, then you will tend to worry. That’s what worry is. The logic of worry is everything will not be all right, I’m out of resources, and no one cares, and everything’s not going to be all right. And Jesus is saying when you look to God, that’s not true. When you look to God, who is sovereignly in charge, and who loves you, that’s not true. So you can’t worry without doubting God’s power or doubting God’s love, and that’s what Jesus wants to combat.

In fact, this gets to the second part of the question. For example, someone tries quoting Scripture and praying but claims that doesn’t work and that they have a mental illness. What do we do? Well, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on with the question here, but we need to be clear that faith is not a magic spell. It’s not hocus pocus; it’s not, “I read you the words of the Bible, you heard them, and so you should just be different.” First of all, we have to match the instruction of Scripture with faith in Jesus Christ, with trust in the Lord. The Word does not change us apart from faith. So the book of Hebrews says without faith, it’s impossible to please God. So this has to be matched with faith, but also, even when it comes with faith, it’s not instantaneous. This is a slow plodding effort. 2 Corinthians 3 says that we are transformed from one degree of glory to another week. A change in fits and starts; it’s two steps forward, one step back. We need to understand that there are hard problems in a fallen world. There are people who are truly broken and overwhelmed with anxiety and worry.

You know, I just was talking with a young woman over the last couple of a couple of months who came, and I won’t give the details of her situation because they’re fairly specific. But she was struggling with overwhelming anxiety, and we looked at all kinds of texts of Scripture together; we looked at Psalm 40, we looked at Matthew 6, we looked at Mark 10, we looked at Philippians 4—we spent a lot of time—we looked at Hebrews 2. We spent a lot of time looking at texts, and this was a really, really worried young woman. And I had another person who was helping me in the counseling and me, and this other person and the counselee we would go to places. We’d go to the ocean where I live in Florida, and we would look at this big expanse that God made—that is power. The Bible teaches that if you trust Jesus, that is a power that is directed at you. We spent a lot of time praying and she would come back, and things had stayed the same, and she’d come back, and things have gotten worse. Then she’d come back, and sometimes things were better, and then as of two weeks ago, the worry is gone, and the Lord has set her free from that at this point. That took months to get to that point, and sometimes it can take longer. So the Bible isn’t a wand that we just tap, and the words wash over us, and everything goes away. This is a process; it takes time, it takes faith, it takes work, and we should not assume that just because we’ve quoted Scripture and prayed for a little bit, that all of a sudden, things are miraculously, immediately going to get better. Things will miraculously get better, and there will be the change that comes from Heaven that transforms people, but often that takes time, and God likes to take time. God wants us to trust Him, not that our circumstances are better. And so faith grows when we continue to depend on Jesus over time and not just when He is at our beck and call and does whatever we want Him to do by taking away our difficulties immediately and with ease.

So we give people the Bible, and we listen carefully to what their struggles are. Different people struggle with worry in different ways. It can manifest itself and all kinds of different situations. So we want to listen carefully, and we want to work hard to try to find texts of Scripture—it won’t necessarily be Matthew 6 where we camp out, but that’s just one example that I’m picking in our time here. We’re going to want to unpack Scripture slowly; we’re going to want to be encouraging where there’s is an improvement. We’re going to want to be hopeful where there are setbacks, and over time the Bible works. This is what the prophet Isaiah said in chapter 55 that [God’s] Word does not go out and return void. So we can have confidence that the Word is working, and we need to stick with it. That doesn’t mean problems are easy, and it doesn’t mean that change is quick—it does mean that when we are faithful to minister the Scriptures, God will be faithful even in a really serious problem like worry or panic attacks.