Killing Anxiety

And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And the peace of God, this peace doesn't come from you. It is sourced from the very character of God.

It's another gift of his extravagant grace, because you share with God every need and every request with surrendered thanksgiving. God shares with you his character and his character knows nothing of worry. Do you ever get an uneasy and anxious feeling in your stomach when awaiting that diagnosis or that acceptance letter or that uncomfortable conversation you need to have?

Do you lose sleep sometimes because of worry? Living a life that's worry-free and marked by peace isn't something you can manufacture. You can't simply force or will yourself into peace.

So how can we experience peace? Well, on this broadcast of Wisdom for the Heart, we're going to look at what it means to not worry and to live in peace. Our Bible teacher, Stephen Davey, returns to Philippians 4 with a message called, Killing Anxiety. One author wrote it this way, worries cast shadows on our future. Stubborn anxieties work like petty thieves in dark corners of our thoughts as they pickpocket our peace and kidnap our joy.

Well said. Listen, every Christian in here, young or old, is at risk. Christians are not immune from anxiety just because we have been eternally inoculated with saving sovereign grace.

I'm upset. I don't have anything to, I'll never worry. Now, in fact, when you get to the end of the Lord's sermon in Matthew 6, he actually ends it by saying, when he describes the subject of worry, every day is filled with things to trouble you.

That's the end of the sermon. You will never master this serpent. You will never outlive it. You cannot outrun it. It comes after you every day, some days more relentlessly than other days. You cannot tame worry. You have to kill it over and over and over again. And when you think it's gone for good, it's back, it's back.

Here it is. Worry is like weeds in my yard. Guess what?

They're back. If there was anybody on the planet that had an excuse to be consumed by worry, it would be Paul the apostle. In fact, as he writes his letters, we would probably all forgive him for a verse or two that says something like, you know, things haven't turned out in my life like I wanted that I expected. I ask you and all the other churches to pray for me that I would arrive at Rome with an unhindered opportunity to refresh the churches, to be refreshed, and have spiritually productive ministry. And here I am, I'm under house arrest, chained at either risk, 24-7 by two Roman guards that take shifts. God didn't answer me like I prayed. And now the churches, by the way, have abandoned me in Rome. My joy and my peace have been swallowed up.

Pray for me. We would forgive him for that. Instead, what he writes is remarkable as an older man. So if you go back to his letter that we're studying to the Philippian church and go to chapter 4, and you read him instead writing these incredibly challenging convicting words. If you were with us in our last study at verse 4, we saw how Paul wrote these commands. He said, rejoice in the Lord always.

Did you get that? Again, I will say rejoice. Let your gentle spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. Make it, you remember, your resolution to be joyful.

Make it your reputation to be a gentleman or a lady. And don't forget the Lord is, he's nearby. Now Paul drops in, if you thought that was tough, get ready, another bombshell of a command, verse 6. Be anxious for nothing. Be anxious for nothing. Now this isn't an option for Christians who are, you know, more mellow than the rest of us. You know, for believers who aren't so tightly wound, like you might be, I certainly am, or excitable or emotional. This is a command for every believer and you notice as he's going to deal with them in this subject, he's going to give them, by way of outline, something to stop. First thing he does is tell us all to stop something. Stop worrying.

You can render this text woodenly, which only makes it all the more challenging. Paul is commanding with this imperative this way. He's saying, do not under any circumstance worry about anything. Do not under any circumstance worry about anything.

He leaves no loophole in the text. In fact, the word Paul uses here for anxious or worry means to be pulled in different directions. It has the idea of everything you and I experience. Our hopes pull us in one direction, but our fears pull us in another. The word of God and our understanding of Scripture pulls us in one direction, but our minds and our hearts pull us in another. It's instructive to track this word back through its English etymology. The English word tracks back to a German root, wergen, which means to strangle, to choke.

Over time, the word developed to mean mental strangulation, being emotionally bound with anxiety. Paul, perhaps more than anybody, knew that it wouldn't do any good. We know it as well. Worry strangles our faith. It chokes off our praise. It crushes our courage.

It silences our song. It doesn't help you get ready for anything in life. If whatever you're worried about happens, worry didn't prepare you for it. If it doesn't happen, worry robs you of the joy that it didn't. Vance Havner, the old North Carolina evangelist, now with the Lord, used to say it in rather homespun language. I love this.

He would say it this way. Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it never takes you anywhere.

It's good. Now, everything I have said, we know, right? If you're old enough in the faith, we already know that worry is useless. We know that worry is destructive. In fact, you probably even know that worry lands you on the side of the enemy that whispers in your heart, God isn't worth trusting, so you better take care of that. You better stay up at night over that.

You're on your own. You better start worrying. We know this. The Philippian believers knew it too. In fact, some of them may very well have personally heard Jesus preach that sermon a few years earlier. Most devotionals, sermons, you know, they sort of stop there. They prove the point that worry is a command or ceasing worry is commanded where to stop it. And maybe, you know, if I spend another 20 minutes, we might come away saying, okay, I'm going to decide to do a better job at stopping that. I'm not going to do it. And I'm going to get my knife ready and I'm going to kill it next time I see it.

I'm ready. We could pray and go home. But I love the way one author put it, worry is perhaps the greatest thief of the Christian's joy, but to tell ourselves to quit worrying will never catch this thief. And that's because worry is an inside job. The battle has nothing to do with the circumstances of life.

It isn't stealing our joy because our life is worse off than someone else's. We've got more problems and more challenges than somebody else. In fact, you find somebody with terrific challenges and you go to perhaps minister to them and you leave having been ministered to.

I mean, look at Paul. He writes this while he's confined, asks perhaps for a little slack in the chain so he can move his quill. Under house arrest, unable to minister like he prayed in the church with him. He's he's going he's heading for a trumped up court with a biased emperor.

He's going to be given a death sentence, not too distant future. And he's the one telling us to stop worrying. OK, well, Paul, since you're the one telling us I will, we'll try to stop back. We're going to try harder. Thank you so much for this verse. And we stop there.

No, no, no. Herein lies our problem. This isn't all he says about it. Notice the next phrase. Be anxious for nothing. Now notice, but in everything, but in everything.

Notice the contrast. Be anxious for nothing but in everything. By prayer and supplication with Thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. Paul in the language world begins with what we call a comprehensive negative. Don't worry about anything. But then he goes to this comprehensive positive. Pray with Thanksgiving about everything. He doesn't just tell us something to stop.

He tells us something to start. You have to do both. By the way, which plane wing matters the most, the left one or the right one? Which one's essential?

Well, they both are. Well, if you want to kill anxiety, you don't just stop and try harder to stop. You start another habit and you do both of them or it'll never fly. So this is what you stop. The habit of worrying.

But you have to start this. The practice of praying with Thanksgiving. Now, what Paul will do here is describe this communication with God, and he's going to use three words, and I think they're instructive in the different nuances they bring.

So let's look at them a little closer. The first word is prayer. We talk to God because we're interested in developing our friendship with him.

We tell him things because we want him to know them from our perspective, although he knows them already. The second word Paul uses here is supplication. Your translation may read petition.

He's not being redundant. The word refers to praying with a sense of urgency, and you've perhaps done that. One of Peter's most effective prayers was pretty short, Lord, save me, and the Lord pulled him out of the water. Now, Paul used the word in this letter to the Philippians already because he and the Philippian believers were struggling for their faith in intense, difficult times, and they prayed with urgency. The third word Paul uses here is request.

This word refers to simply bringing to the Lord any specific need you might have. Bring them. Bring them to the Lord. He knows them.

Bring them. Make your requests. In other words, God desires that we bring full disclosure to him, full disclosure, because we need to hear ourselves say the words, and in that disclosure, we have the development of dependency and relationship and friendship. So when I take my requests to him and you take your requests to him, you are effectively acknowledging you are depending on him. Good to hear you say that, right? It's good for you to hear yourself.

Depend on him. I found a wonderful illustration of this recently. A church planter wrote about learning to pray in a deeper way. He was literally consumed with planting the church and suddenly began to think, not just overtly, but it's going to depend on me, he thought.

It wasn't long before he couldn't sleep at night, became consumed with worry and really distrust in the Lord, anxious about the church. He writes, I got a lesson from my son the other day, and I'll never forget it. He writes, when we moved into our current house, I saved the heaviest piece of furniture for last, the desk from my office. As I was pushing the desk with all my might across the floor, and it wasn't going very quickly, my four-year-old son came over and asked if he could help.

I said, well, sure. So together we started sliding it across the floor. He was pushing and grunting as we inched our way along. After a few minutes, my son stopped pushing and looked up at me and said, Dad, you're in my way. You're in my way. So I stepped back and he tried to push the desk by himself. Of course, it didn't budge, and I realized then that's what I had been doing. Lord, you're in the way. Let me push.

It's up to me. How easy it is to lose our focus and our perspective. See, prayer has a way of getting it right again as we rehearse our dependency in that disclosure.

I love what one linguist points out here. Notice when Paul writes, let your requests be made known to God, that preposition to could be rendered toward. It pictures this orientation. It points you back to God. In other words, it refocuses the lens. It causes you to look in the right direction. We get so focused on things down here. Prayer orients us back toward God. We get troubled or enamored or worried about stuff down here. Prayer gets us reoriented toward God. We get muddled down here on earth. Prayer constantly reorients us toward heaven, as it were.

Now here in verse 6, Paul has used three words to talk about communication with God in order to overcome worry, but he makes one condition. Make all your prayers and supplications and requests. Have this attitude, and it's with thanksgiving. Thanksgiving.

Listen, here's the brutal truth. Without thanksgiving, most often our prayer is spiritualized complaining. Our prayer list is nothing more than whining our way through what God isn't doing for us and how we really ought to have something different or something better. Why God's timing is often our prayers are really to coach him on timing.

He hasn't gotten it. No, pray with this overarching spirit of thanksgiving. I love the way Warren Wiersbe said, look, even God the Father enjoys hearing his children say thank you every so often.

Now listen, this doesn't mean that everything we bring to God is something we've got to be thankful for. There's a misunderstanding. He's not saying that. He isn't saying, well, Lord, this anaconda, he's got me up to the knees, and I just want to thank you for making snakes.

They're so creative and so amazing. No. Isn't that what Paul means? He doesn't mean that everything you bring to God is something you're thankful for, maybe breaking your heart. He means everything you bring to God, you can thank him for overseeing it. You can thank him for strengthening you to walk through it. You can thank him for planning to resolve it one day according to his will. You can come thanking him for directing it even though you can't see it yet toward the perfect conclusion of his purpose for your life.

Praying with thanksgiving means that you're willing to have God reshape your prayers so that you end up wanting what he wants when he wants it. One author wrote about that verse in Matthew 21 verse 22. He said, I heard a sermon on that when I was 10 years old that if I believed I could pray and I could get it. I didn't understand that I had to believe in God's purposes and his sovereign will. And when my prayers matched that, I certainly would. But even if I didn't, because it didn't match his will, he'd make me more like his son who learned obedience through the things he suffered. But anyhow, I heard the sermon. So I was ready to, you know, I was thrilled. I was ready to apply it. He writes, I remember running outside of my little house that afternoon and standing on our driveway and closing my eyes real tight and praying, God, I want to fly like Superman and I believe you can do it.

I believe you can do it. So I'll jump and you take it from there. I love that.

I'll get off the ground and you take the rest of it. He said, I jumped four times, never went anywhere. I was crushed. I must have said it wrong. Or maybe God wasn't listening. Or maybe I didn't have enough faith. Or maybe I didn't believe enough.

Or maybe I didn't deserve it. And all those things we as grown-ups think. That's why Jesus taught his disciples, we pray, thy will be done. That is submissive gratitude because you're effectively thanking him that it's effectively going to happen, right? Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven. How is God's will done in heaven?

How do a hundred million plus angels that John saw respond to whatever God wants? Slowly? With disagreement? With, Lord, let me change a little bit there.

And by the way, higher wages and more vacation? No, the angels live to obey him. They live to obey him. So, Lord, with whatever you're putting me through today, give me that attitude of being willing to serve you as you lead me through this. Prayer is really another way of revealing whether or not we really plan to obey him or want to. Maybe that's why we don't pray enough. I love what one author wrote when he said this, we can be confident that God will answer our prayer in exactly the same way we would want him to if we knew everything he knew when we prayed it.

I love that. We can be confident that God will answer our prayer in exactly the same way we would want him to if we knew everything he knew when we prayed it. It's only when we start praying with that submissive spirit of thanksgiving for the fact that he is in control over everything that we begin to stop worrying about anything. This is what you stop, the habit of worrying. This is what you start, the habit of praying with thanksgiving.

Finally, this is what you can expect. Notice verse 7, and the peace of God which surpasses all comprehension will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Now watch this, and the peace of God, this peace, this serenity doesn't come from you.

It isn't something you work out. It emanates from, it is sourced from the very character of God. It's another gift of his extravagant grace as you share with God every need and every request with surrendered thanksgiving, God shares with you his character and his character knows nothing of worry.

His character knows nothing of anxiety. So his peace becomes your peace. This peace that is not natural, it is supernatural. In fact, Paul says it surpasses all comprehension. When Arthur put it this way, it transcends intellectual power, human analysis, human insight, human understanding.

It is superior to human scheming and human devices and human solutions since its source is the God whose judgments are unsearchable and whose ways are unfathomable. Romans 11 33. So the challenge of the Christian life is not worrying on how to eliminate every unpleasant circumstance or even attempt to understand them, but how to trust your infinite wise powerful gracious God who will lead you through it, who lavishes his grace on us more than we can even comprehend or know.

And since we cannot generate this peace during times of suffering or pain or confusion, no, this peace is a gift from God that is unwrapped when we go to him with full disclosure and independency, trust him, and he demonstrates his grace all over again, one day at a time, perhaps one moment at a time, by giving us something of his character for the moment, his peace. I can't help but wonder, by the way, if Paul is making a play on words here on purpose as he shifts in his seat, making the chains around his wrists rattle a bit, maybe causing the guards to stir from their afternoon nap. Paul writes here, and the peace of God will guard your hearts and minds. It's as if he says, look, I want you to know these guys here aren't guarding me.

I know it looks like it, but they're not guarding me. What is standing guard over me is the peace of God. The peace of God is guarding, notice the text, my heart, that's what I'm feeling. It's guarding my mind.

That's what I'm thinking. And Paul says the peace of God will stand guard over you too. This is an audacious prayer.

This is an audacious supernatural promise. Whenever you pray with thanksgiving for God's purpose over everything, Paul says you will not worry about anything. The more I stagger at this audacious promise merely indicates how much I need to stop worrying and how much I need to start praying with thanksgiving. I love the Puritan prayer and I close with this from generations ago that reads, Heavenly Father, my faith is in thee, my expectation is from thee. I accept thy word, I acquiesce to thy will, I rely on thy promise, I trust thy providence, and I love this phrase, I cast my anchor in the port of peace, knowing that my past, my present, and my future are safely held by nail-pierced hands. I hope that very old prayer is your prayer as well.

You know when sailors want to hold a boat fast, they cast the anchor downward. Christians on the other hand cast our anchor upward in prayer to a God who gives us peace. You're listening to Wisdom for the Heart, the Bible teaching ministry of Stephen Davey. Today's message is called Killing Anxiety.

We've taken this message and turned it into a booklet. It's a great resource that you can use to read again whenever you feel anxious. Today, this resource is available to you free of charge.

You just pay the shipping cost. All you need to do is go to our website, which is wisdomonline.org. If you type Killing Anxiety in the search bar, you'll find this booklet in our online store.

That's wisdomonline.org, and the booklet is called Killing Anxiety. That's all for today. Thanks for being with us. On tomorrow's broadcast, Stephen has another lesson from this section of Philippians. So join us then right here on Wisdom for the Heart.