Overcoming an Anxious Mind

If you don't live with an anchor of faith, you're going to drift in a sea of anxiety.

And most people in the world, they don't have anything to anchor. They have no real grand scheme or purpose in life. So if you just think that you're dangling in some inexplicable universe with no rhyme, no reason, no design, no plan, no God, so all we are are fortuitous occurrences of accidental circumstance. We're here by chance. Well, that's a very lonely place to be, isn't it? You're going to feel very isolated, very lonely, and that's a scary place to be. If you don't know why you're here or where you're going, that's scary.

Stress and worry are a hallmark of our modern culture, but the good news is that you don't have to let anxiety overcome you. Today, we continue our countdown of Skip's top 40 messages on the Connect with Skip Heitzig YouTube channel. In the number two spot is his message, Overcoming an Anxious Mind, where Skip explores the problem of anxiety and shares how you can find peace for your soul through the truths of scripture. Now we want to tell you about a resource that will deepen your knowledge of God's Word even more. There's a top 10 list for just about everything, but what about a top 10 list that can actually impact your faith?

Skip Heitzig's top 10 messages will really make a mark. Here's a sample from What Most People Don't Know About Heaven. Somebody once said there are going to be at least three surprises in heaven. First of all, who's there that you thought would never make it?

Second, who's not there that you were sure would make it? And then number three, the fact that you yourself are there by God's grace. Here Skip teach on heaven, hell, and the end times, and topics like the Holy Spirit and true happiness. And when you give $35 or more today, we'll also send you Reload Love, Lenya Heitzig's book about the founding of a ministry that's been helping children victimized by terror for nearly two decades.

Visit connectwithskip.com to give today and get Skip's top 10 messages on CD, plus your copy of Reload Love by Lenya Heitzig, or call 800-922-1888. Okay, we're in Philippians chapter four as Skip Heitzig starts today's study. I want to talk to you today about one of our greatest struggles and that is anxiety. Anxiety is a thief. It steals your thoughts, it steals your peace, it steals your confidence, it steals your joy.

And in this theme of the book that is overridden with joy that Paul expresses, at some point we're going to have to deal with the topic and the issue of worry and anxiety, which Paul does in these two verses. Now for many years a woman couldn't sleep because she worried that her home would be broken into by a burglar. It was just a thought that plagued her thinking for a long time. Day after day and week after week and month after month for a number of years she had this plaguing thought. Well, one evening she and her husband both heard a noise downstairs. Her husband got up, went downstairs to find out what the noise was and it was, can you guess? It was a burglar. The husband saw the burglar and said to him, could you come upstairs and meet my wife?

She's been waiting 10 years to meet you. The point is simple, a burglar can steal from you once, the burglar of anxiety can steal from you for decades. Now it's sort of humorous to me what we as Americans worry so much about, what concerns us, what stresses us out. We put filters in our faucets, we put air ionizers in our home, we lather ourselves with antibacterial soap, we get worried about avian flu, we get worried about getting E. coli bacteria, at the same time 20% of adults smoke, 20% of drivers don't wear their seat belts and it's estimated that 75% of those who own mobile devices text while they drive.

What that tells me is that we worry about perceived dangers while we ignore real ones. Now, this is the holiday season, this is the Christmas season and this is the time when all of those anxieties and worries go away. This is the time when we don't experience anxiousness and stress. Oh, this is the time of peace on earth and goodwill toward men, right?

Well, wouldn't that be nice? But you know that that is not the truth. What you know is what we found out that 64% of Americans say during this season their anxiety level goes up and not down. And there's reasons for that. There are contributing factors. One of the things that psychologists say is a reality is called seasonal affective disorder.

Effective disorder, given the initials S-A-D, SAD. Seasonal affective disorder is brought on by shortened days, less sunlight, more darkness. That does something to sort of a generalized gloominess that we experience. Another factor is during the holiday season Americans travel. 72% of Americans will travel from Thanksgiving through New Year's. Right in between there, a lot of people are mobile. Well, going to airports, missing flights, weather, snowing people in, etc. All of that raises, not lowers, the stress level.

And what are we traveling to? Well, we want to gather with family, which brings another level of stress. Getting together with family members, some of which we don't really want to get together with perhaps. There's always that weird uncle that shows up or something like that. We worry over buying the right gifts.

Will I offend them? I bought them this size. I hope that fits. Was it enough money that I spent, etc.

Did I spend too much? All of those things contribute. So what we're going to do is look at two of the most significant verses in the New Testament that deal with your mental health. They are familiar verses. I would dare say some of you have even memorized these verses. You know them.

We know them by heart. In Philippians 4, verse 6 and 7, it's part of a lineup of exhortations that we began to explore last time. Just to refresh your memory, if you look back at verse 1, he begins with the style, stand fast.

He commands them. Verse 1, that's verse 1. Verse 2, I implore the two ladies that he mentions. Verse 3, I urge. Verse 4, rejoice in the Lord always.

I'll say it again, rejoice. And now with that same sort of approach and style, he writes the next two verses, and that's all the verses we're going to look at today. Verse 6 says, be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Perhaps, I can't prove it, but perhaps some of you read that and you go, oh well that's nice. It's simplistic, it's naive, it's unsophisticated, but that's nice. Well I want you to know it is not simplistic though it is simple. And one of the things I love about God is he's not complicated. Most truth you will discover is simple truth. Not simplistic truth, simple truth. It is simple but it is also needful. I say it's needful because some of us are stuck in verse 6. We live in the world of worry and anxiety, anxious thoughts, stress.

We never get out of it. So it's simple truth, it's needful truth, but I also believe it's radical truth. If you can somehow get out of the first part of verse 6 into the second part of verse 6 into verse 7, it could revolutionize your life.

It could give you a whole new lease on life. Let me tell you the story about George. George was a busy executive in Pittsburgh.

George worked about 75 hours a week. George had a heart attack. His doctor after the heart attack said, George I'm giving you a year to live.

You probably won't last longer than a year if you keep this pace up and your style of living. And so all of that stress and all of that busy schedule and all that high blood pressure in George's life finally caught up with him. So now he's listening very carefully. He's listening differently to his doctor than he was before after the heart attack.

He goes home to recuperate. And so while he's recuperating, he goes to his back porch with a pad of paper and he writes a letter to God that said, Dear God, I hereby resign as general manager of the universe, signed George. And he always tells his friends, wonder of wonders, God accepted my resignation. I'm going to suggest that before the end of this message, God might be tapping you on the heart saying, I want your resignation. I want you to resign from trying to control everything or trying to worry about everything and be controlled and consumed by anxious thoughts. So what I want to give you, what I want to do today is, and I'm confining it to these two verses, I want to unpack these verses.

I want to drill down. I want to sort of dismantle these two verses into parts, look at each part and put it back together again and see how it all fits. What I want to do is give you a fourfold approach to understanding anxiety and overcoming anxiety. So let's begin with the problem. The problem is shown in the second word of the first verse we are considering. It's the word anxious. That's the problem. Anxiety is the problem.

It's a problem all human beings at some point have to deal with. But I want to tell you about the word that is used. It's translated into English anxious, but the original word in Greek is the word merimnaō.

And merimnaō appears 19 times in 17 New Testament verses. It is translated into three English words primarily. Worry, anxious, care. Worry, anxious, care.

Merimnaō. So when Jesus said, do not worry about your life, that's the word he chose. When Jesus speaks to Martha who was so distracted and busy when Jesus came over while Mary was sitting at Jesus' feet, Jesus said to Martha, Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. That's the word Jesus chose. And it's the same word Paul used in 1 Corinthians 7 when he wrote to them and said, I want you to be without care. That's the word merimnaō.

Concerned, worry, anxious, care. But given that, I now want you to know where that word came from. The word merimnaō comes from two Greek words stuck together.

And when I tell you what they are, you're going to get a full understanding of what worry in the Bible describes. Two words put together, meridzo, which means to tear or separate, to tear or to divide. And the second word, naus, which means the mind.

So you put those two together, meridzo and naus, and you have merimnaō, which means literally to divide the mind. It's an apt description of anxiety. Anxiety is when your mind is divided between legitimate thoughts and destructive thoughts. Anxiety takes your mind in two different directions. It tears your mind. James put it this way, a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. Now, I believe that of all the times in history, this is the time when these verses are more appropriate than at any other time. And this culture, it speaks to this culture in our country more than any other.

Let me explain. We're told that anxiety disorders are the most common mental health problem in America. And they will say, they estimate that 40 million, four-zero million Americans suffer some form of anxiety disorder. That is 18% of all American adults. In 2015, Boston University reported that anxiety has now surpassed depression and all other disorders in our country.

And then I found something terribly interesting. They took 14 different countries around the world and studied them. The World Mental Health Survey stated, Americans were the most anxious people in the 14 countries that were studied with more clinically significant levels of anxiety than people in Nigeria, Lebanon, and Ukraine.

If you know much about those countries, you know those are troubled spots. What that tells us then is the United States of America is the only United States of America is the undisputed champion of anxiety and worry. We win the Olympics when it comes to anxiety and worry. Recently, the New York Times put out an article where they stated, in America, we have developed an ethos of relentless worrying and agitation. And did you know, over the last three decades, anxiety disorders have jumped more than 1,200%?

Amazing. One psychologist, Robert Leahy, said, the average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as an average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s. That's our country. Now, I hope by now you're wondering, well, what are we so worried about? In America, what are we so anxious about?

Well, I don't want to get into all the factors, but let me just sum it up by telling you what the Gallup organization found out. Top things that concern us the most. Number one, personal income. Will I have enough money to survive whatever happens in the future? Second, social security system, which sort of ties into the first.

Will the social security system be able to provide for me when I get old? You know that it's had a lot of problems over the last couple decades. Third, possible terrorist attacks.

Will I become the victim of some hostile act of terrorism? Healthcare availability in the future. And finally, race relations.

All of those are top concerns of Americans. On one hand, I want to say I understand. From the perspective of a believer looking at the unbelieving world, I get it. I understand why their anxiety is so high.

I understand why they're panicked, why they're anxious. If you don't live with an anchor of faith, you're going to drift in a sea of anxiety. And most people in the world, they don't have anything to anchor. They have no real grand scheme or purpose in life. So if you just think that you're dangling in some inexplicable universe with no rhyme, no reason, no design, no plan, no God, so all we are are fortuitous occurrences of accidental circumstance, we're here by chance. Well, that's a very lonely place to be, isn't it? You're going to feel very isolated, very lonely, and that's a scary place to be. If you don't know why you're here or where you're going, that's scary. So one website, and I found several of these.

I always like to kind of dig around and get some statistics and background, but in studying for this this week, I found several websites that said this, but one just sort of articulates it quickly. It said, this is a psychiatric website. Our goal, then, shouldn't be to dismiss anxiety entirely, but just to make it a healthy, manageable part of our lives.

I want you to hear what they just said to you. The very best the world can do for you is to just manage your anxiety. Now, are you good with that? No, because the Bible offers you a chance to eliminate it.

Keep reading. So the problem is anxiety, anxious. The prescription is this, verse 6, be anxious for nothing.

Now, stop right there for just a moment. If you didn't pick up on that, that's a commandment. It's put in the present act of imperative. In other words, here's Paul writing his letter.

He's writing from a Roman prison to a church in Philippi, and he writes this in a very strong manner. I command you, stop worrying, which sounds absurd if you're a worrier. It sounds unreasonable. It sounds naive. It sounds idealistic to tell a worrier, hey, stop it. Quit your worrying, because they're going to say, what planet are you from?

How unrealistic can you be? Now, to make matters a bit worse, if you're a worrier, in the Greek language, this is stated in a very emphatic way so that it could be best translated, stop worrying about even one thing. Now, before you get mad at Paul for saying that, let me ask you a question. Did Jesus Christ say something like that? Ah, he did, didn't he?

In fact, almost exactly the same thing. But with Jesus, though he said the same thing, he gives us reasons not to allow anxiety to rule over us. Listen to his word. This is a sermon on the mount, Matthew chapter 6. He says, do not worry about your life. Same word. Do not worry about your life.

What you eat, what you drink, about your body, what you will put on. It's not life more than food and the body more than clothing. Look at the birds of the air. They neither reap nor gather into barns, but your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? Don't misunderstand what Jesus is saying. He's not saying kick back and be lazy. Go outside and open up your little beak and expect a worm to plop in. Birds don't do that, by the way, because it doesn't rain worms, last I checked.

They got to go be very busy and diligent about finding them. So he's not saying be lazy. When he says don't worry, he's saying don't have an anxious over-concern about life that divides your mind.

That's what he's saying. By the way, he uses the example of birds. Let me ask you something. Have you ever seen a worried bird?

Think back now. Go back to all the times you've looked at birds. Have you ever seen one?

We have a blue jay in our backyard. We've just spotted it. I've spotted it the last week. It's beautiful. Sort of like hangs out between these two little areas. It's beautiful.

Sort of like hangs out between these two little areas. I was looking at him the other day because Jesus said, go look at the birds. Behold, the birds of the air.

So I did. And it wasn't like, it didn't have its little head in its beak and its claws going, oh man, how are we going to pay for the rent on this nest? There was no stress at all.

It looked carefree. So Jesus says, behold the birds. Now in Jesus' words that I just read to you, he gives us three reasons we should not worry. First, because it's unhealthy. Second, because it's unbecoming. And third, because it's unproductive.

Let me explain those. First of all, it's unhealthy. He said, it's not life more than food. You know that worry and stress and anxiety can actually harm your life, your physical life. It can hurt you.

It can ruin your body and your mind. A few biblical examples. King Darius signed a decree and he was so stressed over what he signed that it says his sleep went from him. Neither did he eat. That's Daniel chapter six. Now if you keep that up, not sleeping and not eating, you'll die.

So it's not healthy. King David in Psalm 6, it says that he turned to God and said, I am wary with my groaning. All night I make my bed swim.

I drench my couch with tears. That's depression and anxiety. Then there's Moses, Numbers chapter 11. So stressed out about Israel that he complained. Now listen to Moses' prayer. My burden is too heavy for me.

Please kill me here and now. That's anxiety when you're praying like that. So it's unhealthy.

Harvard Medical School says, those who are gripped by anxiety have a greater risk for developing a number of chronic medical conditions. It will affect your GI system, respiratory system, and has been linked to heart disease. So it's unhealthy. Second reason Jesus gives, it's unbecoming. It's unbecoming of a child of God. It is not fitting for a child of God. For a child of God to be always anxious and always worried is in effect saying, I don't trust you God. You said some pretty cool things that make me feel good for a little while when I read them.

But then I go out and live my real life and I don't expect that you're really going to make good on any of these things. So to be consumed with worry and anxiety betrays a lack of trust in God caring for you. That's Skip Heitzig's number two message on our Top 40 Messages countdown.

It's from the series Technicolor Joy. Find the full message and more of Skip's teachings, including his latest sermons and current teaching series at youtube.com slash Calvary ABQ. Now here's Skip to tell you about how you can keep encouraging messages like this coming your way as you help connect others to the good news of Jesus. Even though we're believers in Christ, we still have to wrestle with the sin nature inside us. But God's Word equips us in the fight. That's why our goal is to get more clear Bible teachings to as many people as possible. And through your generous gift today, you can help connect more people to God's Word.

Here's how you can give today. Now before we go, did you know you can watch Skip's messages from the comfort of your home with your Roku device or Apple TV? Just search for his channel and watch thousands of powerful Bible teachings and live services. Find more information on the broadcast page at connectwithskip.com. Come back tomorrow as Skip shares another Top 40 message, exploring the moment when Jesus returns for his church, a major event in which you can participate. Connect with Skip Hyten is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.